OVER TO WORDPRESS, OFF BLOGGER

TIME TO CHANGE BLOG SITES

This is my last Rollan's Censored Issues Blog notice here on Blogger where I have had difficulties since the new format which I don't fancy. I have just started a new site McCleary's Alternatives
at
rollanmccleary.wordpress.com

Its first feature is Cannibal Skies, Zombie Apocalypse. Thanks for coming here and enjoy going there.

BREIVIK GAY…. AND OTHER INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS

BLOGGER DELAY

I can honestly say that the latest suspicion to arise in Norway’s trial of mass murderer Anders Breivik, namely that he is a repressed gay, is one I had recently arrived at myself and intended to write about here and shall finally say something about. Not however before a few words about why I haven’t written this before.

First, I have been obsessed with finishing my extended essay Solomon’s Tantric Song: Questions of Spiritual Sexuality, which hopefully should be out later in June – someone is working on the cover right now. Second, there were a few others things like forecasts and assessments of current events that I thought might be more important to deal with than any Breivik article. Third, I have had trouble with Blogger itself. When they changed format around the time I obtained a new computer, I put a tick in a box to cancel one article and it wiped out a whole years worth of Blogs including what I had forecast/speculated about Israel this year. I was able to get someone to retrieve one or two of the more important articles which I may put up again, but it’s dreadful. There’s no restore function for errors as in the earlier Blogger system, no way of contacting Blogger itself which merely refers you to a Forum where I found some others were complaining helplessly about my own problem. The net is not really a free zone, we are in the hands of a controlling few, alas.

 THE OTHER FACE OF SCANDINAVIA?

 So to be brief as possible on Breivik and other complex matters…..I admit to be a bit fascinated by both Breivik and the Norway I regrettably haven’t visited – I’ve only made it to Denmark and Sweden more for family connections than tourism - though I’ve gathered it shares much feeling and value with those nations without being quite so secular (the scenery makes for a bit of nature mysticism if nothing else!). But the Scandinavian mindset seems minimally able to recognize or manage evil on the grand scale. It assumes everybody is good or can easily be made good (vide its ultra-liberal penal system), which isn’t necessarily the case. It certainly isn’t a particularly Christian view.

The latter would posit major evil is assisted and promoted by actual forces of evil, even guiding, possessing spirits as was almost certainly the case with the Florida cannibal of recent news who was growling like a dog as he chewed his victim’s body. Surely more than insanity and drugs were here. Just as there was when, high on drugs, Breivik performed his massacre with voices in his head (angelic?) telling him he shouldn’t do what he was doing. But even if angels were speaking to him he went ahead – because he too buys into Scandinavian ideas of natural goodness. In his disturbed mind he is a good man doing good for his nation even though (as revealed by a documentary here on the massacre) a mid European associate with somewhat similar political views still reported recoiling in horror as though hearing the devil when Breivik rang him with some ideas and intentions.

BREIVIK IN A POST VIKING WORLD

Jung famously perceived the principle of compensation at work in lives and societies. If you blind yourself to evil Scandinavian style then you risk producing monsters. And in a perverse, negative way Breivik is the prophet or symbol he perceives himself as being. Arguably he is unconsciously compensating things in Scandinavian society, including a poor management of an inherited violence. The Vikings, were particularly violent and “adventurous”. Scandinavians have now gone to the opposite extreme, making criminal issues out of spanking a child and, at least in Sweden, erecting what Julian Assange calls a society that is the Saudi Arabia of radical feminism. While many of us would question precisely that, it does seem the feminism may be getting out of control. Recently there have been calls to address and refer to all children as “hen”, (it), rather than any defined sex. Again one sees unconscious male rage rising against this. Breivik himself has said against the rearing he received at the hands of his mother, "I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminising me to a certain degree.". (Even while writing this article the intolerably gruesome news from Sweden is that a man suspecting his wife of an affair has cut off her lips and eaten them. Sex and love are not necessarily the sweetness and light some imagine up there in "liberal", permissive Scandinavia!).

The fact is one cannot turn the descendants of Vikings, once the terror of Europe, into domestic pussy cats and lapdogs by modern law in a generation or two. There must be new ways of canalizing and rendering conscious various unconscious masculine ideas and archetypes. Scandinavia doesn’t have enough of these and the women themselves unconsciously resent the situation despite the rationalizations of their animus function – it’s notorious that despite the feminism so many go to the Mediterranean and further abroad looking for gringos (when they do it’s called their rightful sexual liberation, marriage being widely despised in Scandinavia as “possession”) and often prefer settling down with machismo men to living with their own tamed but privately misogynist males. And some descendants of the Vikings do seem just tamed or weak. Take Breivik’s father….

No sooner had news of the massacre got out than this undiplomatic sounding one time diplomat to England and France was condemning his son saying it would have been better he had never been born. But perhaps it would have been better if he himself hadn’t been born!?  By the  time Breivik Jnr was one year old the parents were divorced, and outside of some visits to France Breivik saw his father but little. In fairness to Breivik Snr he is said to have petitioned for custody of his son but was refused – expect the laws of Scandinavia to favour women. (Julian Assange does have some reason to tremble). Number one problem with this murderer, long seen as kindly by friends at school, a protector against bullying, is almost certainly he has lacked proper male/paternal influence. He is a case of Vaterhunger, another victim of the Scandinavian free and easy lifestyles which flee any difficulty in relation - the women too readily walk out of Nora’s doll’s house and the men who don’t want to argue, let them go. When Breivik didn’t manage well in life he just returned to his disliked mother’s not his father’s home  living like a hermit remote from the world. Alienated friends suspected homosexual problems in the withdrawal – they felt he had always been a bit effeminate and obsessed with his looks (the gay painted pony type?) and he hadn’t been notable for girlfriends.

BREIVIK AS AN AQUARIAN “UTOPIAN”…SORT OF.

Whatever his orientation Breivik is also the text book case of the eccentric Aquarius(b.13^th Feb,1979 in London) except that he isn’t just eccentric. He is forward looking and, in his way, Utopian like Aquarians, thinking and speaking in terms of how he will be seen in the future and how history and attitudes will unfold. Unfortunately there’s a bit of method in his madness as there usually is with Aquarians. There was plenty of madness in the likes of Tom Paine, much derided in his own lifetime, but he did see ahead clearly enough on some things including the welfare state. Another Aquarian Francis Bacon well and truly saw the future, his New Atlantis inspired ideas foundational for America. Jules Verne dreamed many details of history in advance.  James Joyce anticipated literary trends. 

All this can be helpful, but the trouble is Aquarians are too often rigid fanatics for what it is they decide is or should be – an all time prime example is North Korea’s recently deceased Kim Il-Jong of North Korea who reduced a whole nation to a state of almost unparalleled destitution and repression for its own supposed good while he indulged himself.  Aquarians, ruled by different, revolutionary, Uranus are also open to anything and this will often mean they incline like the Emperor Hadrian or Ellen DeGeneres to being gay. And we know that as a group gays are trend makers even more than trend followers.

BREIVIK GAY TENDENCIES?

So we have two questions. Is Breivik tapping into any real future and is he gay? As the second question is slightly easier than the first I’ll cover it first. As said there's been talk of using makeup, vanity lack of girlfriends etc. This of course isn't conclusive - Latin men can prove quite vain. What about the birth pattern?  Strictly speaking we need the birth time that no one appears to possess to analyse for gayness, but there are suggestive factors as things stand. Homosexuality falls under the Uranus that “rules” Aquarius though among straights it could just make for surprising behavior or proneness to accidents. But many gays do have Breivik’s Mars square Uranus affliction. It’s what makes for the in-your-face conduct and more reckless and kinky kind of sex of some gays. The massacre was Breivik’s “orgy” of violence under Mars/Uranus. But it’s also an aspect which assisted his technical knowhow to do it, Mars/Uranus people are technical round sex the type that uses kinky sex instruments but the rifle with which he had almost a personal relationship was enough for Breivik. Overall It would however be more helpful to know if Brievik’s moon is in aspect to Uranus (which it could be on his birthday if we knew the time) as this is a surer sign of homosexuality and an associated will to separate from women.

Breivik’s Mars opposite Black Moon Lilith is a strong warning of the already erratic disposition to violence turning potentially demonic at the same time as it could issue from some kind of Viking resentment towards angry feminist womanhood. Yet his cold and conventional Venus in Capricorn could work against wanting to come out gay and/or to experience same sex love as any aspect of his protest. A problem is that on the one hand the loose conjunction of Breivik’s Sun with Mars renders him keen to be rather conventionally male and belongs with his known interest in sports (to help him keep nicely in shape apparently!). But his disharmonious moon in Virgo and other factors could incline him to something more feminine or effeminate. We must also recall that Uranus itself when  as in his case dominant can incline to the sexual extreme whether that will mean striking androgyny or a marked masculinity. So Breivik could swing either way as he appears to have done.

 BREIVIK’S PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPENSATION AND OUR FUTURE WORLD

As to the future, just as I see Breivik as being an unconscious representative of a repressed, politically incorrect but in context not unmeaningful anti-feminism, so he represents awkward unconscious compensation towards something. This is the  excessive, secularist, half, or post-Christian rationalism which simply can’t and won’t accept certain core truths. Breivik is mis-expressing and of course wrongly responding to certain contemporary ideas. Yet he may still in his way be ahead of his time, Uranian style, in recognizing problems not yet to be properly assimilated and enunciated. It is not necessarily the mere “illusion” that politically correct, liberal thought would make it out to be, to insist that a problem exists in the West with such as immigration and multiculturalism. Nor is it necessarily wrong to speak of them as entailing an “invasion” or at any rate some kind of conflict. Repress even the expression words like “conflict” as discriminatory and you court troubles of which Breivki is merely the harbinger. 

Sadly, Breivik’s talk of conflict arguably perceives, Aquarian style ahead of time, what eventually the complacent may be forced too late to realize – there really is a challenge to be addressed by more than appeasement. Indeed, since it seems Christians are on the way to become the new persecuted refugees, the West would not be unjustified if it debarred Muslim immigration just to make room for the massive influx of all those Christians and others the Muslims don’t want near them and which the West is duty bound to be concerned  with if it honestly believes in its own human rights philosophies. 

The influx of immigrants to the West (six million Muslims now dwell in France alone and around 3 million Turks in Germany) is inevitably controversial. It’s hardly racist to ask questions considering the entire population of New Zealand is only around 3 million and the Irish Republic 4 million! We are finally compelled to ask can and should nations be distinct or total hybrids or entirely new entities all but defined by their immigrants who with their higher birth rates will soon rise in proportion to the population? A quarter of all Breivik’s Oslo is a ghetto of immigrants whether Muslim or other, and if and when an immigrant attacks the native (as had happened to Breivik and people he knew and as has happened in Sweden’s Malmo with a major crime problems it hardly dares mention), one can almost rely on police to downplay or even ignore the offence lest the truth appear discriminatory, “racist”, fascist or extreme. So justice is not done and obvious truth unspoken in the interests of a convenience calling itself tolerance.  

This toleration is a mere rationalist, secularist parody of Christian values. The open door to such large numbers of people bids fair to become like the uprooting and (dis)placing of entire nations, nations which, besides, wouldn’t themselves reckon to adopt westerners on the same scale and certainly not tolerate their ways even as a small minority. The persecution of Christians in especially (though not uniquely) Muslim nations is now well nigh ubiquitous from Pakistan to Sudan, and is a scandal of such proportions that a frightened and/or indifferent media doesn’t deal with preferring to espouse the more trendy theme of denied gay or women’s rights. Aid pours into Afghanistan but churches mustn’t be allowed there, Christians are threatened with death, gays mustn’t exist etc. In Europe Britain now has towns with some schools having seventy to eighty per cent overseas pupils to the point English pupils scarcely have identity in their own land and English is not spoken around them. This isn’t a true and enriching multiculturalism, it’s merely a social inefficiency occasioned by the policies of purblind leaders who don’t themselves live in or near the new ghettos.

Worse, at least among some sections of Muslim immigrants, namely the more radicalized which I don’t suggest most are but who can dominate the moderates who fear them, there is hardly such a thing as immigration. Instead, it can equate to virtual colonization (A mosque built belongs to the commonwealth of Islam for ever – the principle has been a ground for raging disputes in Hindu India). The moment is merely awaited when their own values, assisted by higher population growth, can be imposed on the host nation, the process regarded as a religious cum political duty. Meanwhile it can get protested anything great or small barring the way to “acceptance” of these values is “prejudice”. This differs from the outlook and contribution of most other immigrants to anywhere, but again political correctness and the equality fetish must not be allowed to privilege or prefer one group over another. Again, this is the merest parody of Christian agape, one that parasitically and decadently draws upon its legacy.

 WESTERN SECULARIST REASON…. WITHOUT COMMONSENSE

 The irrational hope of the rationalist secularists from which Breivik so embarrassingly separates himself - even to improperly labelling himself a fundamentalist Christian - is that assimilation must and will take place. People will unlearn their past or they will at least learn toleration in diversity. Where is the evidence? It can happen second and third generation immigrants prove more extreme, are more atavistic, more alienated than those first landed (witness the recent Marseilles shootings) and in Egypt once one of the more liberal Muslim nations now wants Christians expelled and/or accorded  second class citizenship. Reason, from which so much is expected in the West, is only ever an adjunct, a correction, a justification to deeper currents of life more unconscious and which are the theatre of religious beliefs, (or unbeliefs and we know how even unbeliefs as of Stalinism can produce their own irrationalism).

The success of eventual integration and/or the workability of multiculturalism despite the signs is the one generalization political correct secularism allows itself. Otherwise it can draw or allow no generalizations. While Rome burns it dithers with the UN and the committee that demands ever more statistics and sociological surveys and proofs. It denies the man of action, which the likes of Breivik think of themselves as being, any meaningful role or voice. It denies the obvious and commonsensical. It is unnatural, and unhealthy an invitation to the outburst. If the West could have generalized from history and culture it would for example never have wasted its time and been so long deceived by the behavior of Assad in Syria. The West and its liberals if they were at all aware and able to generalize should have anticipated the so-called Arab Spring would more likely engender conservatism and desperate upheaval than democracy. Stubborn pride alone prevents these interest groups from admitting their miscalculations and the obvious truth.

Sometimes regretfully one must just speak the language of conflict and accept its burden, something which amid his many illusions Breivik does, though of course we should not pick up a gun with him either. But one cannot trivialize or romanticize or rationalize away major ideological and religious conflicts with all the barnacles  of their prejudices in the style of the Norwegian girl who, with the almost childish innocence of her nation in the face of evil, concluded the docu on Breivik admitting she loved the variety of interests and colour multiculturalism brings to her country. Much more is involved than the variety of restaurants and cultural spectacles, in fact so much more that it’s  almost selfish to talk that way. And until one faces the backlog of social and political irresponsibility governing many current policies, nations risk producing and half deserve the monster that Breivik, once supposedly quite kindly, has become.

 It would be tragic if Norway and the West couldn’t learn a few lessons from the Breivik fiasco but I fear it will ill now get explained away, secularist style, as an accident of repressed homosexuality when it is far more, including a perverse prophetic warning of sorts it would unwise not to heed.

 JERUSALM: THE BIOGRAPHY

Making up for lost Blogger time and keeping to a theme somewhat, everyone either has been or should be reading Simon Montefiore’s book and the have read it persons now include Bill Clinton and David Cameron, the latter oddly admitting to do it backwards. While still writing Solomon’s Tantric Song, I have joined this very wide reading audience for a deserved bestseller that covers a three thousand year panorama of what is often pure horror. The account has sometimes appalled me and sometimes had me in stitches but I feel I have learned a few things along the way and it somewhat colours the above reflections. I can’t take the side of the Crusaders with Breivik, but I can’t go in the opposite direction and take the side of Saladin et al. Even this supposedly generous man like most rulers throughout history has been glamourized and he crucified and tortured people when it suited him. He was only rarely forgiving and mild. The rulers of the Middle East seem mostly to have been Herods for murder, tyranny, torture and lies and among the Muslims they seem to have rejoined the cause of jihad in most generations even if they were personally the grossest decadents. Today’s Puritanism is almost a novel phenomenon.

ISRAEL IN JUNE/JULY

Mentioning Jerusalem leads me naturally to the point that Blogger also lost me an article I had put out on prospects for Israel. I am not going to try to reconstruct its details but just in case and for the sake of it I shall put its core astrological observation on record.

 I observed that there were reasons to suppose Israel might strike Iran in late June or in July, and that, whether it did or not, that would probably be the easiest time for it to engage in such dangerous and controversial ventures. Key for this impression is that the lunation of late June hits degree exact on Israel’s natal Irani. At the same time, this lunation is opposite Israel’s Jupiter and trine its Mars. More could be said but doesn’t need to be so, as this formula covers what’s most essential. It’s a pity that Iran can’t realize Israel is not going to be wiped off any maps as failure to recognize this is likely to cause it and just about everyone lots of trouble sooner or later; but sooner might mean relatively soon. Few things are absolutely guaranteed in astrology (fate is rarely absolute) but there are guidelines and strong probabilities.

The other place to watch is what this month’s lunar eclipse might trigger for New Zealand. I don’t know what is the right best chart of New Zealand but a widely used 1907 ones is seriously afflicted by the eclipse. I mentioned in the erased material of last year that some would-be Anglican prophet of Maori origins alleged he was shown Wellington would be destroyed. He didn’t know in what year, but when it happened it would be in June, he said. Only recently there have been more shakings around Christchurch, so it looks like Wellington might be at some risk at this time.

CORPUS CHRISTI: THEATRE AND FILM OF CHRIST OR WHAT?

FROM DAMNED GAY JESUS DRAMA TO QUEER JESUS LOVE CRUSADE

Already previewed and debated, on the 28th of April the docu film Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption is officially released in San Francisco. The film follows the Corpus Christi gay Jesus play and its reception since 1998. Though some early death threats to the play were always indefensible, any negative reception has been predictable and understandable. I have not managed to attend a performance in Australia and there have been altered versions over the years, but if as reported the play originally included such as “F- your Father, F- your Mother and F-God”, transports Jesus to 1950s Texas where he marries two (female) apostles, is seduced by Judas (did this inspire Lady Gaga’s Judas song?) and is asked by Philip to perform oral sex on him, then by normal standards obviously this would be considered offensive and mendacious in ways presuming on a tolerance other faiths would not extend to it.

If the “obviously” word doesn’t register it’s because supporters, placing the onus for controversy on the religious right, subscribe to implicit belief ONLY intolerance is sin and ANY propaganda serving gay aims is justifiable. Though critical acclaim has included the statement “in this show I found ....how one could reconcile being gay and Christian”, that’s nonsense. And indeed Christians gay and straight alike should never agree to, but rather protest, the hypocrisy of what has now become a virtual CC cult which is printing “I am Love” Tee shirts and promoting itself as a “campaign” against ignorance as though devotees owned a new gospel to rival or better represent the non-Redeemer’s love.

While there’s no reason to dismiss the expression “Gay Christian” as an oxymoron and, like the daughters of Zolophehad (Num 27:1) who successfully questioned Moses’ law, believers have the right to question individual issues like homosexuality, they don’t have the right to ignore the first Commandment by consenting to be inspired by or defended by profanities. Advocating CC is a form of idolatry to the extent it rates rights causes above God devotion and implicitly denies trust that things can be changed without secular assistance. The idolatry of rights to which support of CC belongs, is arguably registered –subconsciously - within the larger community by use of the rainbow symbol (a rainbow surrounds the divine throne, Rev 4:3) to signal LGBT concerns – traditional gay pink and mauve could suffice.

CORPUS CHRISTI: QUEER THEOLOGY BY ANY OTHER NAME
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Since some Christians, especially of revisionist theological opinion influenced by queer theory, ardently defend CC, the question is raised who owns not just Christ but truth as regards homosexuality and does truth matter here? Any truth to fact is easily blurred as Jesus is believed to have said nothing about the non-biblical word “homosexuality”, though as a gay theologian I deny that.

From both inside and outside the Bible I believe much that’s relevant today can be known without descending to irreverence and profanity to encourage dialogue on religion and same sex issues. But that same evidence (whose availability at this time I believe to be not accidental but providential) is as ignored, dismissed or censored as Corpus Christi playing the victim card isn’t. In fact, both the play and the queer theology that derives from the convoluted queer theory which unrepresentatively (even with elitist selfishness relative to grass roots needs), dominates discourse on all matters gay today through academe and publishing, is more or less where they want to be. That, according to the most outrageous of queer theologians, the late bisexual Marcella Althaus-Reid near conclusion of her The Queer God, is the hell zones from which to mount demonic attack on faith as “redemption”. (The Queer God, pp 164-171)

And yes, redemption is being played with by CC. The film’s title is correct if nothing in the play is, and......”many a true word spoken in jest”. Except that the devil is “father of lies” (Joh 8:44) and nothing is “true” for evasive, migratory “queer” theory: not fact, history, doctrine, gender or sex. It’s all negotiable, borderless, permeable, in motion, open and ironic, more bisexual than gay because to be “born gay” suggests something fixed and essential, not floating and relative.

By the same token Jesus, if and when not as in CC recognizing everyone’s divinity, becomes relative like queer theologian Patrick Cheng’s Christ, who might be Kwan Yin whose image, he says in his Net essay Kwan Yin, Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ sits on his desk as he writes theology - that is if the Holy Spirit isn’t Kwan Yin, a speculation queer theologian Elizabeth Stuart is open to. (Religion is a Queer Thing, p.25). The Net mission notice of the MCC Church in the Valley, North Hollywood, controversially declares, “We have discovered the Holy Spirit as Trickster and Mischief Maker... We attempt to practice a little mischief for God by following the Spirit”. The noisy Soulforce activist group, a sponsor of the CC film, is a prime example of queer apostasy which behind an appearance of openness is virtually closed to non-queer perspectives. (Years ago its site even refused all link to and mention of my groundbreaking published doctoral work on gay spiritualities, A Special Illumination (2004) as that would have been too ”commercial” for them. It would certainly have opened upon a few more Christian perspectives. I have also never heard
from the gay MCC church, another supporter of CC from the first).

INCARNATION: GAY PERSPECTIVES

.....But what would any specifically “Christian” perspective be? As regards Jesus himself, most essentially one not compromising incarnation and the related redemption as CC does. Whoever or whatever you assume “Antichrist” represents, denial of Christ as incarnate Son/Logos/Wisdom is somewhere involved (1 Joh 2:22). But just this is what Althaus-Reid’s hell zones queerdom spokespersons and some MCC representatives are involved with. Their materialist “body theologies” don’t give room to incarnation of divinity or embodied soul (pace Soulforce) – this would affirm something “essential”. Instead they embody ideas: compassion, inclusivity, political engagement etc that any person or deity like Kwan Yin might be appropriated to represent. There can be Christ Buddha. Christ Krishna and Christ anybody if it makes people feel together and good.

The reality, obscured by queer theologies and fundamentalist ones alike, and even a reason historically the churches fell into such confusion defining and explaining the two natures of Christ, is that they failed to acknowledge any esoteric or sexual principles. On 20th April England’s Guardian newspaper belatedly reported on Sussex University’s chaplain, the Jewish Christian Canon Paul Oestreicher whose Good Friday sermon declared “Jesus was probably gay”. I suggest there’s not much “probably” about it.

Churches and their councils have always failed to realize that to be incarnate at all and representatively for both sexes, to be the Logos(male) and Wisdom (female), Jesus had, humanly, to incarnate as a gay male. That is to say to be a female soul in a male body, which he was from birth and as good as told people he was when he mysteriously referred to some as born “eunuchs” from their mother’s wombs (Matt 19:12).

The eunuch word, unused by St Paul (who is more concerned with issues like recreational bisexuality and gay prostitution), is the nearest Jesus’ society had to the modern “homosexual”. By Jesus’ times it didn’t invariably mean either castrate or celibate, but it did signify an outsider to social/domestic norms - which all Christians may need to be but may lack courage or discernment to be. In the case of Christ, and precisely because he and his disciples believed he was divine, celibacy was inevitable as otherwise Jesus would be like boundary-crossing fallen angels who mate with women in Genesis. For other persons and circumstances there might be other arrangements as with the centurion and his pais who received a miracle, an episode giving every indication of Jesus encountering a gay relation. But there would not be that relation for Jesus and John, attached though they were. More on Jesus and homosexuality and proof for it presently. First let’s consider those Althaus-Reid hell zones and their happy days when His Satanic Majesty stalks the heavens as an angel of light for the undiscerning.

HEAVEN AS WITNESS AGAINST QUEER

On 19.11.11 Pakistan’s PTA banned the name Jesus from cell phones with obscene and offensive words. (Pakistan regularly harasses its Christians). On that day Saturn, traditionally planetary symbol of restriction and in religious contexts the devil, conjuncted the Jesus/Christ/Messiah conjunction of Jesus’ natus which registers across history for Jesus issues to this day. (More presently, but if you don’t know the extraordinary details of the birth it’s because Christians - who no doubt consider the Magi as disobedient to God as gay Christians - have been screaming abomination and secularists superstition so that the whole vital issue is censored out of range in one of the religious and information scandals of the century).

I rightly guessed that 28.4.12 would show something similar. Sure enough, after moving forward some degrees, by apparent retrograde motion Saturn is back conjuncting Jesus/Christ/Messiah for the day of the premiere. The devil’s in the works somewhere even if queer doesn’t see it. I don’t generalize from a single example.

A DAY OF ISHTAR

On the very day in ‘07 that the Mardi Gras Australian premiere of CC took place, blasted in advance by a Sydney bishop as deliberately offensive but defended by its Christian director as encouraging dialogue on sexuality, there was an eclipse. It fell degree exact on the Lucifer/Ishtar axis of Christ’s birth. And in certain respects Ishtar is – broadly - what and who much queer theorists worship. Althaus-Reid made offerings to images of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast (according to body theologian Lisa Isherwood’s Introduction to Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots, 2011), Elizabeth Stuart can write of God being so frustrating – you catch her scent now and again but She disappears.

CORPUS CHRISTI AND THEATRE LIES

The eclipse preceding the very first and postponed premiere of Corpus Christi (which finally took place 13.10.98), fell conjunct asteroid Lie in Christ’s birth data. Lie itself is opposite Christ’s Part of Homosexuality and asteroid Boda (marriage), both life issues that would always be challenged by various distortions, perhaps especially through theatre and the entertainment industry. Lie is, and the eclipse was, in Leo the theatre/entertainment sign. Recall it was a famously insolent dramatist, Marlowe, was the first to suggest Jesus lived like an inhabitant of Sodom.

MCNALLY AND A WILL TO SHOCK

That the intention of Corpus Christi was to shock and probably offend too, is betrayed by McNally’s data. At birth McNally (b.3rd Nov 1939) had what astrology deems a classic gay signature, Mars aspecting Uranus, but in his case inharmoniously so via the close afflicted square aspect favourable to recklessness and “in your face” attitudes. By what’s called chart comparison this same aspect “attacks” Christ’s reputation through the gay fantasy of the dramatist’s Uranus. It stands in less than a degree of affliction aspect to Christ’s Midheaven angle (his destiny/reputation) which McNally’s Mars then aggressively conjuncts.

THE HEAVENS AND BEING GAY FROM BIRTH

I have explained elsewhere on this Blog and in Testament of the Magi the respectably scholarship supported means by which has made it possible to pinpoint the data for Christ’s birth and read that data in traditional and also modern ways employing bodies still unknown and unnamed in Christ’s day. But because all time and languages are one (to at least God!), the modern input works and vividly to this day.

Any remaining mysteries about Christ and homosexuality are dispelled by the extensive evidence emerging from the patterns, including the close connection of Born and Saris (eunuch) across the so-called ruling planet of Jesus’ birth, a feature which bespeaks his self-identification as a born eunuch. Only recently, against all probability I have seen what looks like coded confirmation that the mysterious raca issue in the Sermon on the Mount, which I and others have long speculated implies condemnation of homophobia and cursing the faggot/outsider, is very likely that. Aramaic Raca was slang for faggot/effeminate. Suggesting the personal tensions and conflicts involved socially and personally for Jesus, a new asteroid Racah eloquently and argumentatively conjuncts Honoria (honour) and the Part of Coitus of men with women (the faggot is dismissed as lacking) while challengingly opposing The Part of Sexuality in the House of sex besides. Be that as it may....

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GAY DEBATE

The tragedy of the current gay debate is that it leaves the spiritual condition of gays caught between the nutcrackers of profane heretics seeking to liberate them and fundamentalists seeking only to cure them. Both in different ways deny the gospel truth that (even if and though some people are sexually undecided, challenged or bisexual) most people are born one way or the other and must work with and from that.

Unless it’s a case of drug or sexual addiction, God is not in the business of curing gays, and it’s falsehood and even cruelty to maintain otherwise. Nor can and will gays destroy religion, the family and civilisation – unless they go the way of directionless, amoral queer theory. It’s little short of divine judgement upon churches that the message “born that way” gets out through the sensationalist Lady Gaga rather than persons properly representing their faith. If praise is not given the stones will cry out (Luk 19:20). Likewise truth will out from any source if Christians won’t do their duty. But I have long realized that the fanatical, Pat Robertson style view of gays – everything up to and including they are devil possessed and cause cyclones – will never be cured unless and until there is the shock of realization that Jesus himself would today be considered gay.

A QUEER WISDOM, BUT NOT OF THIS WORLD

Yet almost no one is willing to consider and assimilate that fact unless via the distortions of the profane much as, anciently, only the contaminated messages of false prophets were eagerly received. I have recited before how, despite being published on gay spiritualities, I have not had reply from a huge list of persons and groups including the specifically gay MCC church who theoretically should have had every interest in my work. It is also apparent the wisdom of the wise and this world which God confounds (1 Cor 1:19) is unwilling to countenance the possibility that the skies might be witness to Christ and anything about him in acute revelatory detail besides. That would be one miracle too far. (After all, Dawkins might be amused).

When former editor and religious journalist Phyllis Tickle wrote me about my researches – not being gay she at least had the kind consideration to respond! – from years of experience with publishing she informed me there was no one she could imagine would consider such material if she were to recommend it. Then woe to the fools of faith (and unfaith) in the circles she knows, who in recent years have all too often published any lies and profanity about Christ for profit. Arguably people might search further and press harder if the subject was deemed important (which credibly to solve the mystery of the Magi after two millennia should be to the point of being historic), but that’s another matter.

As things stands, it’s just a case of “no room at the inn” over again. A very devout believer on whom I tested an early version of my work, admitted they nearly fainted out at certain implications and were so troubled they took it to Jesus. Later they alleged Jesus spoke to them about this and told them the reason people were not listening, and that the researches I have been dealing in is what the world is meant to know. At that point I had better rest the case and simply declare that Wisdom is justified of her children (Matt 11:19), though personally - in at least one thing like St Paul! - I can’t “suffer fools gladly”, especially not queer profane ones and fundamentalist fanatics.

THE TITANIC: CAUSES OF AN OBSESSION

A CENTENARY RENEWS THE MYSTERY AND PATHOS

Looking in at some of the centenary Titanic material I ask myself, not cynically but curiously, quite why this ship’s disaster continues to haunt us to the degree it does. The James Cameron Titanic film of 1997, though perhaps the most overall inaccurate and romanticized record of the tragedy, was the biggest grossing film of all time (until his own Avatar overtook it). We now have even a Titanic Requiem being performed.

There seems little question that all our fears of drowning, sudden disaster, of loss amid ease and pleasure, separation from dear ones, the thought of having to look the jaws of death in the face gather around the story; but then there are tales of loss and heroism at war that have great pathos. So perhaps too we see the Titanic event, occurring as it did not long before WW1 as also profoundly symbolic in more impersonal ways, the soon disappearance of an empire, a lifestyle, a world that no longer exists though we are not vastly removed from it. Some of us just project personal associations upon it. In my own case when I was a child I was on a vividly remembered voyage between Wales and Ireland so rough people thought the old ship might sink - which a few weeks later it actually did, but fortunately enough in Dublin harbour rather than out at sea!

A BLACK TRAGEDY OF ERRORS

But there’s not just the pathos and the symbolism, there’s also our incredulity at the tragedy which has perhaps increased over time as research has made the picture clearer. Humanly it turns out to be a saga of the most mind-boggling, incredible series of errors, oversights and accidents from the weak, low grade iron ore rivets in the steel plating of the perfect ship and insufficient lifeboats insufficiently filled because officers didn’t understand how many should go in them, to the undelivered wireless messages and even making the vessel sink faster by gathering speed instead of staying still or at least progressing very slowly. How could even the keys to the box containing the binoculars for the Lookout have been lost?

The list goes on and on. Many people and things contributed to the disaster but it strikes me one of the most directly and gratuitously guilty was (inevitably and unjustly!) a crew survivor, Harold Bride. He seems to have been too interested in sending income boosting radio messages for the rich and famous to be concerned with warnings about general conditions and icebergs. When he was strongly told he grew so irritable with the nearest ship, the Californian, which could have steamed over in time to save passengers, it switched off for the night so that emergency messages couldn’t be received when needed.

If the passengers remained too long secure for their own good in belief the ship was unsinkable, not even the popular captain Smith that millionaires like to travel with seems to have been too bright. An arbiter of fashion, Lady Duff Gordon, who had been prone to interesting states of foreboding during the voyage, walked on deck on the morning of the 14th and found it so cold she was convinced icebergs must be near which the Captain laughed off as improbable. But admittedly it was improbable. Though April could be a dangerous month, icebergs shouldn’t have been so far south at the time and it seems the massive culprit had broken off and made a very long journey and even from the time the Titanic began to be built.

The story begins to become like a parable of something, a dark tale of doom or retribution like Captain Ahab’s Great White Whale or the whale that God “prepared” for Jonah, all ultimately unavoidable. Yet not entirely unavoidable. There are strange tales of people’s late cancellations for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, everything from dreaming it would be wrecked to perhaps providential “accidents” that prevented their going as in the case of various clergy like the Rev Holden whose wife’s sudden illness prevented him from leaving for America, Pastor Nesbitt’s suddenly changed arrangements. The ship had been like a challenge to fate by its very name. The titans like fallen angels had revolted against the Greek ur-God, Saturn. The Titanic was the boat that ”even God himself couldn’t sink” (famous words attributed to Captain Smith who perished so that we can’t check) but which nature if not God did sink.

FATE AND FAITH ON DROWNING SEAS.

It’s a sign of the times that this last weekend’s docus did not stress religion really at all though the event would carry a lot of religious resonance and stories for many people. The Cameron film included violinists playing “Nearer my God to thee”, but it’s disputed it was precisely this hymn was played. However we do know that on deck there were priests giving absolution (to those from the second and the half abandoned third class) and on some boats, like the one 17 year old John Thayer managed to get onto after floating around, people were praying and singing hymns.

However not everyone on all life boats. The unsinkable Molly Brown was registering she was unsinkable and Lady Gordon in her detailed and fascinating account, and despite all her justified premonitions about the Titanic (where or how did she have them?), never once mentions God or Providence in the matter. In the lifeboat, scarcely able to endure the cold, the sea sickness, the sight of the sinking ship and the cries of the dying across the waters, like Voltaire’s Candide she only mentions that the stars above the boat (the night was illuminated by only stars, it was the dark of the moon with a new moon due on the 17th) seemed remote and uncaring to the scene. She hardly seems thankful to have survived – possibly she suffered survivor guilt. The British Dulwich College science teacher Lawrence Beesley likewise registers nothing emotional but the horror of the screams of the dying (some said they went on for hours but that’s what it must have seemed as most people would die in minutes from hypothermia). There is no thought or mention of God or fate; we may suppose science forbade everything but fact.

An idea I musingly draw from what I read and hear in this respect is that, (as I describe near the end of my The Great Circle), belief is a truly complex thing and is not necessarily influenced or decided at all by disaster, emergency and the face of death. People have a sense of God and the beyond or they don’t and often seem to believe what they want to believe. Ultimately it is almost as though there is a predestined, or at least highly “irrational” element to the faith decision.

The most extreme Titanic story of the religious kind belongs to the Scots Baptist minister John Harper after whom a memorial church would be founded in Glasgow. He was the traditional “soul winner” and was so to his last breath. His “last convert” a fellow Scot who managed to cling to some wreckage till he was later rescued would later attest that Harpur had heroically given away his lifejacket and was being driven back and forth in the water. He had come close shouting to him to trust in Jesus and be saved and asked him if he thought he was saved. “No,” replied the man. Harper was driven away by the current but later swept back to him and shouted had he now put his trust and was he really saved?” 'No, I cannot honestly say that I am' was the reply. Harper then sank. The man said he suddenly then believed. As I don’t find the name of the alleged convert one wonders if this is evangelical fantasy but probably not as Harper had also been observed by numbers of people on the sinking deck and then in the waters similarly calling on people to place their trust.

BELATED GRIEVING?

Harper’s daughter, Nina, survived but as her mother had died in childbirth she was brought up by family friends who never let her even discuss the Titanic during her youth. One wonders with such suppression and repression, with no grief and trauma counselling how even with prayers, hymns and faith Titanic survivors quite managed. And it seems they didn’t do so too well. John Thayer suffered depression and committed suicide later in life, Madeleine, the widow of John Jacob Astor who drowned lived a confused and troubled life. There are similar tales.

The most important thing would seem to be that we should learn a few lessons from the Titanic, not just the need for responsibility and efficiency on sea as much as land but even the need to mourn and express rather than repress which perhaps today we do rather better than back a century ago. Indeed it is almost as though the collective sensed it had to do the grieving for people and those of a generation who never quite did it for themselves. However the recent wreck of the Costa Concordia, another tale of remarkable bungling, suggests we may not have learned as much as we might have done.

DANNY NALLIAH’S FALSE DREAM OF JULIA GILLARD’S LOSS

Pastor Danny Exceeding his Spiritual Remit Again

With the narrow Labour win confirming Julia Gillard as Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, finally and thankfully, Danny Nalliah has been caught out. By now notorious for his dreams, especially of '09’s forest fires declared to be divine judgement for permitting abortion in Victoria, Nalliah, a one man Aussie version of the American Right with dramatic visionary input, had a vision of “godless” Gillard ceding defeat before media. He has also been telling people to pray she would lose this week and has been wrong. It wouldn’t be surprising if Nalliah will now declare the Victorian floods are a judgment for endorsing Gillard and that Christians should be repenting they didn’t pray hard enough to fulfill his dream which expressed less prophecy than God’choice and intention. There are interesting questions here re prophecy (does it exist?) and divine will (can it be known?).

Personally I am delighted with today’s close result which is likely to force Australia into a more consensus politics and a whole raft of reforms the Independents have successfully bargained for. I also feel enormous relief and justification as someone who myself lays some claim to prophetic insight and had reasons to doubt Nalliah’s dream as soon as I read it. Recently recovering from the shock of a disturbing prophetic dream that proved true (but which I didn’t rush to the press or even my Blog to discuss though it is covered in a new book I’m editing) I believed God had told me all one needed to know the night before the election.

DANNY NALLIAH, A HEALER WHO SHOULD GO EASY ON PROPHECY

But I’ll say first, despite his eccentric streak, unlike some people I don’t consider Danny Nalliah bad or mad. He is well intentioned in his way and I think he has real gifts for especially healing. I also believe he did Australians a good turn challenging anti-vilification laws for which he suffered a long drawn out court case defending his right to free speech as regards ability to criticize Islam. But when it comes to prophecy, which is supposed to be gift and a vocation, the healer and rights campaigner exceeds his remit and brings himself and religion into disrepute.

Yet even as Nalliah rushes in where angels might fear to tread, he is slightly more correct than church leaders who currently have nothing more "prophetic" to say to their congregations on the fate of nations and leaders than that atheists can be good persons. That’s hardly the point, especially if there is any kind of divine fate, will or “choice” at all involved in leadership - a tricky subject raising questions about the absolute as opposed to merely permissive will of God. Conservatives like Nalliah believe God always has a “choice” for leadership we should discern and pursue. The belief ignores that while undeniably God is depicted as choosing such as King Saul - who serves God’s purpose of driving back Philistines but is otherwise useless - he is “chosen” only after Yahweh has democratically conceded to Israel’s decision to have the monarchy God doesn’t want. Also Israel is covenanted to God and other nations aren’t.

On August 31st Danny Nalliah put out a message that in a dream he had seen Ms Gillard conceding defeat. The message was meant to be definitive as it was accompanied with a list of other supposedly true dreams - we were informed, once again, he had foreseen the Victorian bushfires – he left out how he had seen prior shooting mayhem in central Melbourne that never occurred. I have questions about one or two other vision claims but we can pass over that.

A couple of days later Nalliah was not quite so convinced by his dream as not to issue another missive telling the faithfu how he had felt physically sick and been up half the night beseeching God to prevent the horror of a Labor/Green alliance giving Australia into the hands of a sinful atheist and “a practicing homosexual” (Bob Brown). He wanted fasting and prayer to prevent this disaster and on the basis that what we bind on earth can be bound in heaven (Matt 16:19). He even perceived the political situation as direly similar to when (the supposedly Christian) Bush narrowly beat the New Age Gore in Florida, through the power of prayer allegedly. (As it was a matter of narrowly disputed vote count this might have been like asking God to cheat numbers in a Republican interest).

NALLIAH TRYING TO BIND AND LOOSE EVENTS

Nalliah’s position makes no sense. If you believe that anything you bind on earth can be bound in heaven by prayer, how and why did early Christians suffer the evil and persecuting emperors St Paul so controversially said must be accepted from God as part of the authority that is his will? If your stomach is too weak to accept an atheist and “a practicing homosexual” in power, how would you manage emperors at orgies or Christian kings throughout western history openly living with mistresses?

While obviously God would not approve the likes of Nero, God is still understood to support organization over anarchy (which even the imperial systems can represent) and democracy or at least what reflects the people’s mind because:
a) as per Ps 115:16 “The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings”. So humans must make their choices and,
b) because as per Mk 12:17 we are supposed to accept the division of church and state basic to democracy and thus render to Caesar what’s his and to God what’s God’s.

Granted this might make it seem God has no will as regards rulers (unless for covenanted Israel) or that all things can’t work together for good as St Paul insists (Rom 8:28). But this is to be unaware how things may always be working sooner or later for God’s plan as indicated presently. As to believers “binding” and “loosing” things, this has more to do with healing and exorcism. It’s not carte blanche to organize national politics for unbelievers. What Nalliah believes can be claimed for nations is based on OT statements made in the context of Israel being covenanted to God in a way Australia isn’t (even if some people do believe Australia is or should be “the Great Southland of the Holy Spirit”). If Nalliah thinks otherwise then it’s close to the Dominionist heresy of some American churches which assumes Christ can’t return until all nations are under laws instituted by a politicized Christianity.

With and without visions, Nalliah regularly treats current party politics as though a presidential race built on personalities - “ungodly” Gillard, versus “godly” Abbot - not whole parties with their mixture or believers and unbelievers. Like Abbott, he also regards politics as confrontational, not realizing what Australia needs and which the present crisis may help precipitate, is a more consensual, flexible system.

GOD AND GODLY POLICIES FOR AUSTRALIA

Granted there are policies to consider and – marginally - the Coalition has represented more specifically Christian positions especially re chaplaincy for schools and prayers in parliament. But not only did Gillard’s atheism concede to chaplaincy, no matter how important such matters regarding faith might be, other matters like reform of health care, hospitals and schools, issues from homelessness to broadband do count. Also it was Labour not the Coalition that said the necessary “Sorry” to Aboriginals. It hardly serves God if one arrives at the equivalent of a “Tory party at prayer” situation, good for organized religion but little otherwise than big business or the cities. Though Christ is neither left nor right, a parable like the workers in the vineyard ( Matt 20:1-`16 ) is basically socialist.

I don’t say that as a committed socialist – I tend to be a pragmatic swinging voter -and in the recent difficult poll have suspected with the eccentric Bob Katter the decision may be between “the lesser of two evils”. And I do think the Left wastes money. The fact remains the Coalition has been very conservative by modern standards. The regions have been ignored, welfare has been below European standards under the Coalition, higher education half killed off under it – the religious studies dept where I obtained my doctorate and which was once deemed one of the best in the world, now shares its reduced curriculum with several other depts due to radical cuts. The mind of the people, if one thinks it counts for anything, was not being expressed on many things under the Coalition. That includes gay marriage on which the Greens may impel Labour to a conscience vote.

This leads me to mention three subjects to which Nalliah and conservatives are hysterically opposed but on which it could be that they don’t have the mind of God at all.

1). If they increase electricity charges by four, I agree the Greens would be unmentionable, but for the Christian Right and Nalliah are unmentionable for other reasons. They regard the Australian version of Green as controversially godless which it seems to be (though the movement itself was founded in Canada by a Quaker) but we need to recall that saving the threatened Barrier Reef is a policy priority for Greens. Supposing it were an important issue for God? As mentioned in my Cosmic Father, I had been shocked to be told by God to pray for the seas. It has taken the Gulf oil disaster for anything like that idea to cross most Christian minds.

2). Gay Marriage. “Godless” Gillard doesn’t support it, but may be forced to a conscience vote by the Greens. Regardless of various contemporary theological and psychological perspectives on the gay subject, if one were to argue solely within Nalliah’s framework, one can well ask what if God might actually want gay marriage passed? Married gays are less likely to be involved in unsafe sex. God doesn’t want gays dead of AIDS; the longer they live the more time to change their ways and beliefs. Health and soul surely count for more than the formality of whether marriage belongs solely to straights or not. And Jesus’ bride, the Church, is composed of both sexes. If Nalliah can’t and won’t see that simple point, then perhaps privately he’s like the Ugandan churches that want gays jailed or executed under the law. Like many religious conservatives I doubt Nalliah is completely open about his position on this subject or just doesn’t know what it is but has knee-jerk reactions anyway. Just to see Bob Brown embracing (not even kissing) his partner made Nalliah feel ill and rushing to God in distressed prayer. Ever heard of homophobia?

3) Abortion. Nalliah’s position is the Catholic one - it’s all always wrong. Doubtless there’s too much of it and late term abortion will always be controversial, but the negative position doesn’t enjoy the unanimous agreement of even early Christians. Tertullian believed the child must be sacrificed to save the mother’s life. (One of a list of reasons writer Anne Rice recently rejected Christianity was after a Catholic nurse in Arizona was excommunicated for recommending abortion to save a mother’s life). Augustine refused to say early stage abortion was murder. It is this intransigent refusal to countenance any grounds for abortion, and the indifference to the often difficult situations into which doctors are put – would Nalliah like doctors fined and imprisoned in Victoria for using their discrimination? – that has put Christians outside the pale in most people’s discussion of this subject and been a pretext for secularism to argue for abortion on almost any grounds.

DID GOD WILL “GODLESS” GILLARD’S ELECTION WIN?

Can we hope to know God’s will in these matters? Would God, contrary to Nalliah’s assumptions, “choose” an atheist and should we? The answer is a provisional yes, it’s perfectly possible.

First, let’s remember God does as he wills for his purposes and “even the wrath of man will praise you” (Ps 76:10). Without compromising human will God can oversee events in a way that will assist the larger picture in the long run. There is some scope for individuals to do wrong and make evil choices, but they cannot fully go against the tides which will force correction later if not sooner. Ecclesiastes famously writes of a time to break down and a time to build up, to plant and to pluck up. (Ecc 3) What does this and more of such statements signify? It means there is a hidden cyclical factor which the rabbis knew of and it’s the cycles of time and astrology that religious conservatives reject as the abomination of divination Jews don’t understand it to be. It’s a reason astrology could feature in even Christ’s birth. I have often said that Christian prophecy and prophets could well be checked for probability and accuracy of claim against it. The more egregious errors could be avoided by this means.

The fact is Australia is in a cycle which requires it to change and what is now happening will help propel it towards that. Gillard herself was always going to make it. I will concede that I wouldn’t have cared to forecast it, astrologically at least, before last weekend when finally I discovered Gillard’s birth time and even then it was still difficult because we didn’t know Abbott’s to make comparison. However, when I saw that tomorrow’s lunation would be conjuncting Gillard’s Midheaven (her career/destiny) it seemed sufficiently unlikely she would lose for me to start writing this article ahead of the announcement. Now that I know the result and its timing and can see the full birth pattern, it is devastating just how fated transits and Gillard’s pattern are for her stepping into history. She was always fated to win. It is most unlikely Danny Nalliah or anyone’s interventions would not have stopped it and Abbott was always fated to lose too. The prior eclipse, always a good gauge, had been negative to his pattern.

There is much more one could say about these patterns, some of it quite technical, but my main religious point is that these tides and cycles reflect God’s will. They exist and can be traced because they parallel God’s will. Elections have never much concerned me religiously or in any other way, but this election was confusing, tightly fought and potentially historic, so that for once on the night before polling I put it before God, trying to clear my own mind. I still remember the strange sense of relief and wonderful clarity that overcame me when the message I received was simply to pray that Julia Gillard would “make the right decisions”. It wasn’t a forecast, but it might as well have been so because if it was decisions she has had to make and will be having to make and they will be difficult ones, so I did suspect I had been told the answer. Why would her decision-making matter if she would shortly lose? Even if she retired tomorrow or the consensus won't work already she has made many decisions with the Independents which will help change politics here and redirect some needed attention towards regional Australia.

We need to remember that Christians are told to pray for those in high positions (1 Tim 2:2). That is the task under any circumstances. Trying to influence voter patterns by prayer is dubious and if you think that kind of thing is right, then perhaps you will be rewarded with false visions.

I hope this election is a wake up call to Danny Nalliah who is not a person easily persuaded from his position on anything. I have several times written without response from him or his secretary and as this included paragraphs in a book of mine which mention him, clearly he is not a man to hear anything but what he wants. Contrary views come from the devil, I fancy. I shan’t be trying to contact him again. I just hope what he is gifted for is not damaged by his vainly getting into what and where he is not meant to be. I haven't made this an open letter but I would say: Leave it to others who may not have the spotlight you are given and possibly seek, but who now and again may know more.

PS. DANNY NALLIAH'S SEMI-RESPONSE TO ME

Following the election result Danny Nalliah put out an invitation to send "thoughtful" responses to the puzzle of his Gillard vision. (His own opinion is that he must still be correct, but that he got the timing wrong). Although I said I wouldn't be writing to DN again as he just won't reply, in the circumstances I did send the address of this site and article. Amazingly, within around 10 minutes of emailing it I actually received a reply, pointing me to all the positive responses to him on his site that would disagree with my position (People were indeed writing in to assure him he is inspired and must be right really).

If thoughtful responses were required then considered replies to them would be appropriate. It is impossible my article had been read, absorbed and replied to in such a brief interval. In fairness, since the article wasn't written for or to Ps Nalliah, the opening wasn't too flattering, but the rest was more fair and deserved his consideration. I imagine he read the opening lines and not desiring the negativity of criticism just dismissed it. This recalls to me some of the correspondence sent to this Blog about my false prophet articles. They mention prophets in California living in unreal worlds where their every word is hung upon and admired, every success built up, the failures ignored.

I still believe Nalliah has gifts, even if prophecy isn't their prime feature, so I just hope he won't now be spoiled by his followers turned from a pastor to an infallible guru buoyed up on an revivalist roll. It's also the fact that according to St Paul,(Rom 11:29)the gifts or God are irrevocable, and thus it is quite possible that even genuine divine gifts can continue to manifest even when the person has developed some wrong attitudes and policies in relation to them. The big problem with Danny Nalliah is he is narrowly opinionated on a whole slew of political and ethical issues and because God's gifts seem to accompany him (most recently the papers have reported he has raised a dead woman) followers feel obliged to imitate his every view, rather than seeking out the truth for themsleves.

Finally by a bit of Net research I now see Nalliah misforecast the 2007 election likewise, though this time blaming people for not praying enough to make the prophecy a certainty. See
http://www.hnlc.org.au/rensford/resources/Nalliah_election_false_prophecy.pdf

However I also see there seems to be some kind of Toronto Blessing and similar connection where Nalliah's Catch the Fire ministries is concerned. That should make anyone suspicious of his gifts and just what he represents.

ANNE RICE’S SENSATIONALIZING DECONVERSION

A FACEBOOK ABOUT-FACE ON CHRISTIANITY

This week Facebook has been theatre to best-selling author Anne Rice’s grand About-Face. Sensationally and rather self indulgently Anne Rice, the atheist reconverted to Catholicism in 1998, has now declared herself “in Christ’s name”, out of Christianity and no longer calling herself Christian. Since she refuses to reject Christ about whom she has written novels in recent years (in '02 she was in a mood to declare she would write nothing more unless on Christ) and then in view of the list of her objections to “Christianity” it might have been more appropriate to have declared herself no longer Catholic. She could then perhaps quietly have gone somewhere more Protestant where she could have been allowed her broader views on women, contraception, gays etc. But some people, particularly a type of American star personality, can’t do anything quietly. Gestures must be extreme and absolute, the whole world must hear and hopefully sympathize too.

Unfortunately, because of Anne Rice’s vast influence in many languages, it's quite likely that many will be as influenced by this about-face and make “I’m not Christian” statements as trendy in its way (and go further with it and more literally) as they once did with the Goth morbidity of her Vampire novels.

My disappointed reaction to Rice’s announcement agrees neither with those who simplistically and sympathetically buy into “poor” Anne Rice’s siding with Christ against the unpleasantness of his religion and its adherents, nor with those who say she was just a bad Catholic who should never have returned on the terms she did. These reactions are missing what I sense is the real, more hidden point and which my own minor, brief dealings with Anne Rice had led me reluctantly to suspect so that I'm not surprised at what has happened and at a propitious moment for such shocks too. (It comes in the wake of an eclipse that set up an affliction to Anne’s Mars and at the time of a portentous Grand Cross of stressed planets in the heavens that oversee such major problems in America as the wikileaks and of course Anne is making another info leak of sorts).

ANNE RICE’S HAUNTED MIND

Anne Rice is a person carrying a lot of emotional and spiritual baggage, a person still prey to her inherited demons and for this reason, whether reconciling with or renouncing religion, she risks functioning as a negative spiritual influence upon the masses. For a start, I do feel in light of things I’ve read about vampire cult in America in all its morbidity and which Anne Rice’s fiction unquestionable helped to popularize, a deep conversion would surely have made her more keen to renounce her previous writings than has been the case. If publication of earlier work could not cease for contractual reasons, she might have given away the proceeds of it.

It doesn’t seem this has happened and if she had concerned herself a little more with,say, the poor and disadvantaged, her incredibly petulant and judgemental view of Christians as nothing but a 'quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group" might have been modified. Many of us might agree to be sickened by such as impossible Catholic hierarchs, bombastic tele-evangelists and some testy, eccentric evangelical homophobes, but some Christians do actually roll up their sleeves and do some good work. Despite covering herself by refusing to renounce Christ, in fact Anne Rice has done so. She is as "out" as she claims to be, since Christ is explicit that loving him involves loving his brethren for whose feelings Ms Rice doesn't appear to care much, just as she doesn't seem to care about the effect of her words in the world.

If one doesn’t burn one’s boats more than the 100 million copy best-seller author has done, and show gratitude to the deity she said she was grateful to for bringing her out of the swamp of atheistic pessimism, then one merely keeps one’s old problems and demons alive for oneself and everyone. This kind of thing concerns issues of spiritual efficiency which is what I am writing on at present.

Clearly Anne Rice and her spiritual advisors have not given much thought to anything remotely like so-called “deliverance” ministry for which under the rules she would almost certainly qualify in a major way. The author went through years of depression and is the child of a problematic family overseen by a seriously alcoholic mother. She recognizes within herself something like a dark drive to hurt and destroy – her Called From Darkness memoir includes details like how she mused upon throwing someone over the stairs. The sort of life patterns she describes is the sort of thing needing real healing and banishment.

MY OWN EXPERIENCE OF ANNE RICE

Because it is so hard to reach “stars” or else to get them to reply, I was initially impressed when Anne Rice wrote to me very nicely a couple of times in response to my comments on both her own chart and what I told her regarding my work on Christ’s birth data. She admitted it was fascinating, but as her writing on the Christ fiction was well advanced she couldn’t or wouldn’t let it influence her at that stage. I and most people can’t admit a birth date as early as 12BC that she was working on.

Having given her some indication of things I was engaged on, in more recent times (last year) I wrote and asked her to look at my Cosmic Father book because it could interest here given the way it included a grappling with problems that specifically had been concerning her. I also suggested, given her issues around the church and gays, that she and/or her gay writer son might look at my groundbreaking study of gay spiritualities. This I hoped wouldn’t seem mere vanity or presumption on my part. If the book can lay claim to be a world first in its line and has had some media attention and the person I am addressing is having problems with the church, including round attitudes to her gay activist son, it seems to me only reasonable to contact as I did and one would hope for reply….if there is a sincere will to deal with the issues in the first place rather than just explode against Christianity and Christians about them. But is there?

In fairness to Ms Rice, we are all busy and one can’t reply to everyone and everything (I wouldn’t myself) but she had written to me before and there were other things I won’t go into it, things she was saying or blogging about her reading and thinking which suggested to me she was somehow not quite rightly spiritually on the right path. So if I felt a bit offended, I was not entirely surprised to receive no reply either. I had strongly felt I should write and I will always feel Anne Rice was wrong not to reply. I see it as all part of her faltering spirituality which seems ready enough to tell and confess in the dramatic, revivalist American style, but which in reality is perhaps not telling and confessing enough. Anne Rice’s Facebook About-Face marks not just a crisis in her own life but is symptomatic of one within American religion itself.

RECENT FORECASTS FOR 2010 ANY ASTROLOGER COULD HAVE MADE

WHEN PROOF STARES OUT

If you want to prove astrology and yourself as an astrologer you should get a few forecasts correct. And on the global front I feel I missed some golden opportunities to do just that recently. This was not because I couldn’t read the signs, but because, a) I didn’t want to seem too sensational and b) I was too preoccupied (and still somewhat am with writing a non-astrological book from which I’m taking a rest), so that I felt it didn’t matter too much. But perhaps it did. You get weary, but also you just get used to having astrology trashed and ignored to the point you wonder whether it’s worth commenting and predicting anything at all.

Here are things I was expecting to happen and that did and how and why one would have to read the signs this way.

STELLAR SIGNS OF AMERICA’S BP DISASTER.

Though I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted a big and ongoing American disaster in terms of specifically an oil rig, that America was going to be hit damagingly hard from April on was pretty much shown by the fact that…

The lunation for mid April that preceded the explosion of the 20th was degree exact in what’s called affliction aspect (a square) to America’s foundational Mercury. One could then see this danger signal was well certified because it would be followed up by a full moon smack on America’s ascendant angle (I use the Scorpio rising chart) showing the population could be seriously affected. But then this lunation was guaranteed by every rule of astrology to deliver the trouble implied because the all-important scene-setting previous eclipse had opposed the same afflicted point, warming it up so to speak. Also, and very bad news, Pluto whose cycle is a 248 years one, is/was transiting opposite America’s Venus/Jupiter conjunction meaning that it is opposing the nation’s goods, resources money and just good fortune generally (nothing in astrology is more fortunate than Jupiter/Venus).

With all this joining together (and other factors we can pass over here) it was “elementary my dear Watson” that something had to give. Foreigners would likely be involved too because national Mercury is in the 9th of the overseas and it rules the eighth of shared resources. This points to an outsider involved with the national economy – at this moment in time, BP, making the mess. Mercury in water and the seas sign, Cancer, was a hint of possible damage through the seas. But frankly the picture is just drastic. This is a big, ongoing long term disaster with all sorts of consequences and it’s hardly surprising to learn it’s being found to be worse than initially thought.

America from now on could be in for a lot of bad news and if truth were told, with Pluto due to oppose the national Sun in 2014, it’s not an unreasonable speculation that around that time America could even cease to be world leader. Decline of power could be quite rapid. Pluto transits are hugely associated with the rise and fall of empires and super-powers. America is finishing its empowering Pluto cycle and there’s much reason to suppose the great days are over and there is plenty now to reckon with and get used to.

A DEFINITE FORECAST OF GAZA

How could anyone miss it? Israel was in for big trouble in recent days. The May 14th lunation prior to the flotilla crisis fell at 23 Taurus 09. This means it was significantly conjuncting. Israel’s sun is at 23.41 Taurus. Plus martial Mars has been transiting in Leo, the sign of Israel’s sun (and other planets) so that it’s also a regular trigger point for upsets and situations of aggression. The national sun falls in Israel’s seventh house of open enemies which is why it’s constantly so challenged by just about everyone (despite some deranged persons like a Turk on the streets of Ankara protesting to SBS news that Israel is dangerous because “it persecutes the whole world”. The whole world? That has to be some kind of paranoid psychological projection but which with a Seventh house sun a nation risks suffering).

It’s easy to accuse Israel if one is determined to, and plainly some are, because Gaza is an appalling, suffering mess. But while Israel is not guiltless there, much of the problem is caused by endemic corruption, suffocating bureaucracy and internecine fighting by political groups bent on power there while the people (though not the unfortunate children) are to some degree victims to problems of their own making, hating Israel but still half glad to be martyrs in conflict with the “pigs and dogs” nation they don’t wish or really intend to come to any real terms with.

Apart from being plain busy, the only reason I didn’t post alarm signals here about Israel’s situation was because I was worried about getting the level of manifestation right. It didn’t seem to me the month promised quite the all-out war that many in Israel had been expecting and still do for this year, or that some wilder Christians of the American prophetic school had been forecasting – Iran blown to smithereens or the Gog Magog war itself perhaps! I didn’t quite see that….not yet anyway. It seemed almost better not to fuel further speculation which, if anyone even bothered to listen, would almost certainly only get exaggerated.

I’m not keen to speculate further about Israel in any direction, but I’ll say I don’t much like the look of the August lunation conjunct Israel’s Saturn, though that could be more about leadership problems and disputes with Obama and America than outright war. (Saturn has been and soon will be for the long haul in Netanyahu’s sign, Libra. He has his work cut out and plenty of serious decisions!). Israel, a bit like America, is caught into force majeure Plutonic problems given Pluto back and forth opposing its Venus. Since Israel’s Venus rules its open enemies house in which its national sun sits besides, this has all sorts of potential for foreign foes and increased challenges. But Israel will outlast the America that may abandon it under Obama, if Obama stays around long enough. There are no Plutonic oppositions to Israel’s sun coming up as there are to America’s. Iran needn’t be too sure of wiping Israel off the map. In fact, it won’t happen. Israel will survive us all. There will just be trying and dangerous times for it.

THE MCDONALD’S GAY AD AND A URANUS HIT TO THE WORLD POINT

I simply knew that when Uranus would hit a World Point (this time 0 Aries, perhaps the most important of the six points) the world would see and hear something controversially gay within a short while. It did. Uranus entered the point on the 28th of last month, but May isn’t the Gay Pride month like June. So whatever date the ad may have been launched in France (it looks like the 26th May two minutes of a degree off Uranus entering the world point ) it first reached international media as a hot topic on June 2nd with the moon broadly timing the event in suitably shock-staging, and alternative Aquarius.

In France it has been seen as a joke, (by everyone but gay leaders who have long been on bad terms with McDonald’s and now feel exploited and angry for obscure reasons) but in sections of America it has been seen as further inroads of gay “agenda”. Some even proposed no Christians should ever eat in Mac’s again! Clearly everyone is having a great time accusing everyone else of something, though those moderates who actually like the ad find it, however unintentionally, educative and almost poignant.

I must admit I had thought Uranus on the WP might be more about the Vatican and the Pope who was actually born with Uranus there and who, (since conjunctions can swing either way and be very pro or anti something), is very against anything openly gay and officially opposed to gay rights. We know, or perhaps we don’t, how the Italian press regards Benedict, but anyway the Pope has so many Uranian shocks and surprises round him that surely something else gay related around him could scarcely register by now - though one never knows. But anyway….Mac is going gay. In France anyway and whether outraged gay leaders there want it or not. And the guy of the ad’s fated gay teen role at least seems representative enough of France - traditionally given by astrologers to Virgo - by looking distinctly Virgoan. Quite likely the anonymous “snowflake” as some call him, has his sun, ascendant or some kind of planetary emphasis in the sign.

Except that I don’t eat at Mac’s, I took the matter half personally when I belatedly discovered the news because I’d just come from writing something about France in the new book. I also happen to have Virgo rising and there was a shock of recognition. When I was in my teens, though I do have brown eyes and wasn’t the spitting image, heaven knows I was close enough in dress, expressions (that sidewise glance) and general appearance including to being very pale and having just that haircut. And heaven does know, since confirming I’m not too far off here, a temporary signature any astrologer would recognize was present – my viewing time for the clip had the moon exactly favourably aspected my ascendant (appearance to the world).

I finally see why when I travel internationally there are people determined to address me in French, unable to think I could be other than French. And yes, to pile up data, this current Uranus is presently directly aspecting my Jupiter in Sagittarius, planet and sign of anything foreign, suitably triggering delayed realizations; including that maybe I should have prolonged my youthful working life in Paris indefinitely and got spotted and celebrated for something or other….. But….. I realize a lot of people don’t take these stellar signs as registering anything at all.

GAY SCEPTIC, TONY PITMAN, DOESN’T LIKE ASTROLOGY

Documentary film maker and gay activist, Tony Pitman, is now back in Australia following years in Latin America and doling out sceptical theories on everything under the sun on Monday night’s Reality Check show for Joy Radio in Melbourne. Recently and for three weeks it was astrology took the whack. To everyone their opinions, but I felt the subject was taking too great a beating and being just misrepresented or misunderstood and it was time for some check mating of Reality Check. To overcome an objection about vagueness in astro interpretation, I described Tony’s chart with significant name and place asteroids which when added to the picture pretty well describe his life itself, why he was in Mexico, in Paris, how he won the Lionel Murphy award and so on, including that his birth name, originally Anthony, was rising over the horizon in its Greek and archetypally gay form of Antinous at his birth.

There is a place to send your comments for the Tony’ show. In the months since the show started there had scarcely been a comment. My own was never printed. As the studio told me, Tony has the legal right to refuse. Which I wouldn’t question, though it is/was a pity for astrology. I said however I questioned the moral right. Tony Pitman has gone further than almost anyone in Australia in opposing the principle of censorship, putting on street demos about it to the point of risking arrest. “It takes all sorts to make a world” but TP is determined to be a distinctive type among the “all sorts”.

AN ANCIENT PROPHECY OF UGANDA VERSUS THE GAYS

With Uranus on the World Point I wasn’t too surprised to hear on the news Uganda’s exceptionally draconian and internationally criticized anti gay laws might go ahead in some form or other soon (though I wonder if things might not be delayed till there’s some Saturnian input that’s due). Whatever precisely happens and when, it would be hard to describe just how disgusting the proposed laws are and the people who support them and put ideas into the nation’s heads in the first place (including some stars of the lunatic fringe of American evangelicalism like the creepy Benny Hinn, though the tabloid Ugandan press is not so favourable and loyal to him not to have alleged gay behavior by him in their country with a leading evangelist - just possibly it's the real grounds for the divorce petition whose pretext remaina a mystery to Hinn fans in America). Whatever….McDonald’s ads and snowflake boys keep your distance from the African heat, Uganda’s New Jerusalem has no room for you! Even to say a word in favour of anyone’s gay rights and even not to report someone you know is gay could have you in Ugandan jail if the fanatics get their way. Actually, just be and do something gay yourself and they’d like to have you executed or jailed for life, though that at least the international community seems likely to be able to prevent.

“From a distance” as the song goes, God is watching and the Ugandan church had better beware. The finger is pointed in their direction. Almost in defiance of human belief (but if you work enough astrology you begin to get used to miracles), on the Pentecost day of the Church’s foundation two thousand years ago, what only in our times would be named the asteroid, Uganda, was conjunct of all things, Antinous, name of the great gay archetype. I said above that conjunctions can go either way. This shows us that Uganda simply cannot deal with homosexuality, and its being anti-something to a monumental degree is what historically will have most (un)distinguished it. I’ll not go further and deliver further surprises about Uganda on this subject – they can be included in a chapter of the book I’m writing, but I’ll simply declare something is terribly wrong and was always foreseen to go wrong in that country.

ASTROLOGY, THE FORBIDDEN MODE OF PROPHECY

So here we go again, or at least here we are. Whether it’s gay Antinous, Anthony, or just plain Tony Pitman and/or or the big world beyond his Reality Check sceptical purview, the fact is that serious, (as opposed to parlour game) astrology’s endless PR problems can be expected to meet us from every side. If people, and I mean especially media and publishing, don’t like astrology, end of story. Here’s one of the reasons I couldn’t even be bothered to expend the energy amid other concerns to forecast things I quite plainly saw coming. I am sure many other competent astrologers would tell you exactly the same thing.

SID ROTH: TRUTH AND ILLUSION

HOW WISE AND HELPFUL IS SID ROTH??

Whether or not Sid Roth will ever start growing younger as one of his guests prophesied he would, he is not the kind of person in imminent danger of growing wiser with age. In fact, he risks increasingly making a fool of himself and the eager flock that follows him; and if it weren’t quite so sad and serious, in some instances it might be almost amusing.

I am not about to say, (as some keen to trash American media religion would doubtless wish), that everything that has reached Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural, show is nonsense to be dismissed and avoided. At least some of the themes and guests have given real grounds for reflection and the books of two persons interviewed I have recently cited in something I am writing. But two recent broadcasts epitomized for me the negative side of Roth’s quest for “the naturally supernatural” and left me appalled. Plus it’s just hard to excuse Roth too easily in light of correspondence and testimonies I have been receiving.

Way back in September ’08 I put out two Blog articles about false prophets and prophecy. For some reason, presumably linked to the dearth of critical treatment of the theme on the Net, these articles have attracted more attention than others I felt were more important. I still regularly receive correspondence about them. I can’t and don’t publish most that gets sent (and obviously I don’t include those irate messages which tell me I’m blaspheming the Holy Spirit for even questioning their favourite prophets!) and some of the correspondence is anyway to me personally, not for Blog comments publication. But...I’m aware by now I’ve hit a raw nerve. There are people either personally suffering or seeing people and churches rent apart by some of the individuals put on a pedestal and uncritically accepted and promoted by media religionists such as Sid Roth though clearly “inwardly they are ravening wolves” as the gospels would tell us.

Of broadcasts which appalled me in recent weeks one featured a certain Katie Souza and another featured film maker, Darren Wilson, whose latest offering once again included something of his friend, the spiritual “equipper”, Jason Westerfield.

KATIE SOUZA: EX CAREER CRIMINAL ASCENDS TO HEAVEN AND BUSTS CLOUDS

Katie Souza got introduced by Sid as a virtual Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde, a career criminal. There isn’t much this hyper-active, super-resourceful person hasn’t got up to and engaged in around Hollywood, from vehicle theft and gun shoot outs, to drug pushing and making – she set up her own factory to increase income. When finally caught and locked in the slammer for thirteen years reality suddenly hit and she turned to Jesus – again. (To gather from her site she had apparently been converted years before but let slip). We are supposed to be impressed by her story – Sid is overwhelmed as usual - a sort of grace abounding in the chief of sinners tale. But something doesn’t quite ring true, especially the way Jesus supposedly gets Katie out of prison real fast and even tells her the exact date of release in advance.

We no longer live in a Christian world that talks penance especially if we’re not Catholics, but if Souza was truly converted one feels that like "Son of Sam" Berkowitz who, though exorcized and converted, mindful of his crimes has refused to ask for parole, Souza might at least have taken her medicine and slowed down a little to examine herself. Did she stop to mourn the lives of those she may have ruined through especially her drug dealing? St Paul who called himself chief of sinners and least of the apostles for having persecuted the church, retired to the desert for years before emerging with his new message.

Souza hardly waits to take breath. She starts reading the Bible and rather more. Influenced by the controversial David Herzog, (another of Roth’s highly dubious favourites), she’s off like a shot on her spiritual motor cycle and working inside Herzog’s “glory cloud” to produce miracles on the quick rather than wait, as others might need to do, for years. She even has material out that Roth is happy to promote which supply you techniques to get what you want from God - fast. You ascend to heaven like Jacob on his ladder - did he do this when he saw the ladder? - and you sort things out at “throne room level” with God. You may be given a sword to cloud bust, demon dragon kill or whatever, but you’ll get what you and others want and need. Apparently the farmers of Oklahoma only had their harvest last year because Katie ascended and sorted the weather out with God, the angels and a sword. Oh how feeble of all the Christians and saints of history not to have got their God techniques sorted out!

Please note too – though the undiscerning Roth who these days feels the power of God in the studio almost at the drop of a hat, can’t – that the glory cloud talk is nonsense. There is none. The divine glory is God’s presence which is fire hidden by the cloud. One doesn’t “work” in or with any cloud like so many Christian magicians. Katie has (heretically) learned from Herzog that creation itself was somehow effected through the Glory and she has even decided that because Jesus looked to heaven at the feeding of the five thousand, it’s a sure thing he was drawing on the Cloud and we should do the same. I mean.....anyone can just read up on it all in her book and CD! One can also listen to her final benediction on the show and be blessed. “In Jesus name” may our finances be increased, may we be given our needs etc......There was no reference in conclusion that was not purely material. If God cares for our needs God cares for other things too, and any genuinely spiritual person will remember that.

DARREN WILSON WITH ANGELS, WITCHES AND JASON WESTERFIELD

Now back one show before Souza to young film maker, Darren Wilson’s latest offering, Furious Love though that requires I mention an earlier production. Wilson’s original investigation into charismatic miracles, Finger of God, also featured by Roth, had supposedly received some of its impulse from an odd angel who kept repeating, “Are you ready, are you ready, are you ready?”. (Weird angel that can’t say what he means!). Near the beginning there is a group of people under the Toronto Blessing aegis – a warning sign in itself for deception and charismatics become virtual witchcraft as it’s the Holy Ghost laughing, barking and roaring movement triggered by Howard Rodney Brown who threatened God with suicide if he didn’t come with suitable blessing and who actually calls himself “The Holy Ghost Bartender”. Heavenly manna appears and that trendiest of miracles, gold dust has arrived. This time in an odder than usual way. An elderly man is lying helplessly on the floor under the anointing with gold dust on his trouser crotch making it look as though he’s peed himself. With people peering at the man’s crotch because gold dust’s there we’re informed the Lord must have “a killer sense of humour”. Really?

Incidentally, Sid Roth just loves the gold dust and heavenly jewels miracles. Kathy Walters, one of his guests, keeps getting dusted, so much so that prophet Bob Jones (who takes friends to heaven just by holding their hands) has assured her “it’s God kissing you”. The craze for gold dust (what biblical prophets ever knew of it?) started with the late half-crazed (or possessed?) Ruth Ward Heflin, Herzog’s guru, who was so eccentric she believed if she could dance in jet airliner toilets over certain areas of the world that helped to insure revivals in those areas!

Wilson’s latest film thankfully doesn’t include gold-drenched Kathy (who once told Sid the angels invite her to ride in chariots around the universe – as her natural Christian “inheritance”!) but early on, and then by way of grand finale, it shows (teleporting, astral travelling) Jason Westerfield’s supposed miracles. No, it’s not one of his visits to the White House and other centres of power to overhear high level meetings, but involves Jason almost forcing himself in a park upon someone with crutches whose limp, injuries or whatever, Jason heals. True, it’s done in Jesus’ name, but the recipient of healing never gets beyond being puzzled and declaring, “It’s cool”. Something doesn’t feel spiritual about the episode. It’s not exactly the Book of Acts on film with the power of God being experienced by the one healed, it’s more an episode in the general feel good ambience that Westerfield’s showbiz background easily conveys. The film concludes with a street drifter being pepped up and cured of a limp and back aches by a friendly JW. Again the event feels unspiritual, almost staged, (though I’m not charging Wilson with that).

To gather from clip of the latest film, Westerfield features again and oddly so in a way that should send out danger signals. For this docu Wilson’s group seeks to “confront” the dark side and the occult - they want exorcisms presumably. They travel to Salem to a witches’ meet. Nothing happens despite prayers all day – they probably don’t hear because they shouldn’t be where they are or doing what they’re doing. But suddenly Westerfield is moved. He approaches a witch, a black male, puts his hands on his shoulders and stares at him and just loves him and loves him in Jesus’ name. The warlock stares back slowly lowering his hood. Jesus has apparently loved the witch “furiously” and successfully. Job done, point made.

But what point? There’s a similarity here to the situation described in a controversial Jesus novel I once reviewed in which Jesus doesn’t really drive out any demons. He so intensely loves them they get uneasy with his love vibe and depart. It was an idea I wrote at the time was interesting and imaginative but which I couldn’t accept. Which I can’t. It isn’t what Jesus’ war upon the other realm is about. It suggests a forgiveness for the evil spirits which is not divinely permitted to them in the way it can be to mortals.

It’s not clear to me quite what Westerfield is about (some of my correspondents would say money – he lives in some luxury - others can only see a saint). He appears loosely affiliated with the New Mystics line in prophets. Chief spokesperson for this trend/group is the unspeakable John Crowder of the Drunken Glory Tours and Sloshfests. He converted to Jesus during an LSD trip and seems to imagine one can “toke the Ghost”, (pretend smoke or inject the Holy Spirit like the latest drug of your fancy). I can’t be bothered to decide where Jason W belongs on any New Mystics spectrum because wherever it is I don’t regard him from his odd conversion story onwards - he originally knows nothing about Christianity but some being/angel? visits his room so he starts reading up on scriptures – as representing any adequate form of religion.

JW is regarded by charismatics a la Roth and Patricia King of Xtreme Prophetic (who helped launch the disgraced and disgraceful Todd Bentley onto the world) as an exciting channel for wonders and spirit force and the mentioned clip looked to me like a lower spirit force recognizing a higher one. Which isn’t the same as to say it was necessarily God. Otherwise surely the hoped for exorcism would have taken place. And exorcism can only in rare instances take place without consent of the possessed. So, if the witch didn’t want his familiar spirit(s) to leave, what is all this about?

There are simply too many questions here and all I can say is I feel Wilson and Roth have no business to let this kind of thing so un-discerningly through, promoting it as though it’s somehow either notably supernatural or Christian. The Roth promotion is always that if someone is “walking in the supernatural”, producing healing (whether medically attested or not), it simply has to be good. And followers will assure any critics that it’s nothing but jealousy, faithlessness or demonic opposition if you question things. (Love of Truth is not a possible motivation, it seems!) But I insist if Roth and Wilson can manage to accept some of the evidence they do (even if mixed with good evidence) then they risk becoming like those who offer “strange fire” mixed with the offering in the book of Numbers (Num 3:4) or even the absurd Pentecostals of Kenya who welcomed Benjamin Creme’s Maitreya as a visitation of Jesus. See my February Blog article “How Real is Maitreya?”

SID ROTH’S TRICKY STARS

When in doubt blame others. Despite his evident hunger for the magical, Roth is on something like his moral high horse if anything like a borderline subject, say, astrology, is mentioned. It’s occult! It’s forbidden! It’s divination! It’s evil! This, despite the fact astrologers came to Jesus’ birth, the Essenes sought signs of the Messiah in the skies and the Talmudic rabbis had plenty to say about the astrology that was never understood to fall under the “divination” rubric that American fundamentalism has invented for it and pursued with its usual fanaticism. But then of course, wicked astrology can supply disagreeably awkward facts.

Number one for Sid Roth is that the conjunct Sun, Mars and Mercury of this typically communicating, media-savvy Gemini (born 30.5.1936 according to Wikipedia) are under what is called direct square “affliction” from Neptune - text book stuff giving a strong warning that Roth risks being either himself subject to, or else conveying to others, a degree of illusion. Belonging to the aspect is all his too frequent “sensing God’s presence” or angel presences in the studio and all the concomitant wiping the floor to people with some kind of “power” but too many personal and financial ambitions beyond it that bear no kind of connection with traditional prophecy.

Real prophecy if anything is more involved with abuse, failure and rejection. One doubts that Jeremiah would easily get into Roth’s studio (or many another religious programme). These days with media religionists few can get an honest word in. I am only writing this article publicly because I can’t write a message privately and hope to have a meaningful response or trigger any conversation. It’s just not the way big religious concerns in media or publishing function today. If God sent a message from heaven tonight, it would be largely blocked by the manipulative, very worldly American religious system drunk on celebrity names, money deals and agency (what’s your church? who’s recommending you? who’s your agent? what’s your CV?) and which even often has the insolence to request positive feedback only to websites or 100 word messages to fit office convenience. Many have the minds, in short, of what St Paul called “men pleasers” (Eph 6:6). Accordingly if anyone is offended or embarrassed by such as myself being public in open letter style it’s not my responsibility. It’s the fault of the system which American religion creates, then bows to.

SID ROTH’S INTERNATIONAL AMBITIONS

Sid Roth’s less than purely prophetic concern with miracles, healing and the supernatural appears to have an insufficiently examined basis in his Messianic (Christian) Jew desire to reach Jews. It’s an impulse that has heated up and increased recently, including controversially in Israel where rabbinic warnings have gone out against him, especially for the contents of a book, They Thought for Themselves, which Roth is trying to have distributed everywhere and appealing for funds to manage to do so. You can read a free version of the book on the Net. And it’s of genuine interest with perfectly fair comments from its contributors about Jewish backgrounds, rabbinical ideas and so on.

I am not seeking to oppose what it’s Roth’s perfect right to do, namely to try to teach and persuade others if he wishes or believes he should. Mission has always been a Christian imperative and Roth believes that years ago he was “told by God” to write and distribute the book. So, fair enough. But that was years ago and situations and persons change. Today, if what Roth once had was a genuine vocation it stands to be undermined by his current lack of discernment and possibly a touch of vanity or megalomania that by now seems to underlie the ambition to change a whole nation via media. And with gold-drenched Kathy diving under a table because she sees the archangel Michael turning up in Jerusalem to assure her Sid has a special mission for Israel, one ought to smell something more suspicious and less exquisite than the supposed heavenly aromas from the miracle worlds of Bob Jones and X-treme Patricia King.

For a start, Sid Roth believes he must produce or promote miracles because that’s what will, in St Paul’s words, “provoke the Jew to jealousy” (Rom 11:11) and belongs to the signs that Jews want 1 Cor 1:22). What’s getting overlooked amid this is that St Paul disapprovingly mentions that the Greeks demand wisdom and the Jews signs. Miracles are important, but belief is not meant to be founded on devastating people with the supernatural where they should be practicing faith. Jesus even tried to hide some of his miracles to avoid falsely based belief. Surely one of the reasons the Jews desire signs is because few people among traditionally religious peoples could be considered more sceptical and closer to sheer atheism than the Jews. If Sid Roth seriously imagines that the average Jew is going to listen to some of his supernaturalism as opposed to question or laugh at it, he is again seriously misled.

What Sid Roth’s change-through-miracles programme panders to is partly his own weakness for sheer magic, the same weakness that drew him years ago into the New Age and which he claims gave him the familiar spirit that finally so took over his life and terrified him that he converted to be rid of it. But the hunger for magic hasn’t disappeared and just possibly its spirit or spirits have not completely departed either – ironically one of the more solid personalities Roth has featured, exorcist Don Dickerman, controversially warned about instances of perfectly sincere believers remaining semi-possessed or at least obsessed by their original spirits. It’s hard not to believe the grosser errors of some prophetic stars of the charismatic heavens come under just this category especially when there are histories of long term prior involvements in drugs or occult practices. The Holy Spirit, if star performer charismatics really do have the Spirit, is a bit too near some other spirits for comfort.

SID ROTH: ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD

I can only say to Sid Roth and those who follow him, beware! Or at least start using some discrimination if you want to influence people meaningfully and with integrity. Christians are told “to try the spirits” (1 Joh 4:1). Roth and his team plainly like a good story, and it’s doubtful they’ve seriously done too much testing of the spirits if it interferes with headlines stuff. I realize the team says it does everything “under guidance of the Spirit”, but they need to remember that if you’re stubborn for your ideas you are warned that God will answer you according to your idols (Ezek 14:4) and the idols here risk being signs and wonders. And the extent of the wonders is no measure of their validity. The gospel warning against those who say “Lord, Lord” but don’t belong to the kingdom is nonetheless made against those claiming the extreme, to have prophecied, to have cast out demons and raised the very dead (Matt 7:21,22) and all in Christ’s name.

Despite all I’ve said, I believe that Sid Roth is basically well-intentioned and not a mere deliberate fraud, and I repeat that some insights can be drawn from some of the people and themes he has investigated. It’s just that for the kind of tricky areas he deals in, an area where truth can mix with illusion - and there’s no lie like a half truth - something more than just good intentions may be needed.

AFTERWORD ADDED FEBRUARY 2011

SID ROTH AND IT’S SUPERNATURAL THROUGH THE TOILET DOOR

For me the final straw with Sid Roth is the ridiculous promotion of “supernatural travel”, or transportation by another of these never to be trusted advocates of “The Glory”. Sid interviews a certain Bruce Allen (who looks a bit like Wikileaks’ Julian Assange) who has been “led” to promote this "mantle", the Christian’s inheritance of supernatural travel. Bruce learned of this when the Lord supposedly began cutting down his driving times across Washington State after he prayed over a car bonnet. It turns out that we all need to learn, and we all can if only we have faith, to travel and conveniently disappear or even go transparent as in a supposed photo of Bruce dematerialized during a church service. Jesus is now teaching this branch of the miraculous because when, soon, believers will be persecuted or the Mark of the Beast is imposed, they will need to have safe place getaways. Just walk through a supernatural portal into glory power - apparently it’s God’s own shield against your martyrdom! (Wasn't the most recent teaching that believers would be raptured before there was any Mark of the Beast?)

It gets worse. The travel idea came to Bruce from a friend telling him of a friend Richard who, to serve the Lord’s will in evangelism turned up at Kenya airport with no money or passport but knowing he must leave on a plane. God commands him to enter the third stall of the men’s toilet and to start praising the Lord. After five minutes (did occupants of the washroom hear all this praise?) he opens the lavatory door to find himself in France.

One wonders how Richard then managed if he didn’t speak French. Perhaps he spoke to the cyncial French in tongues?! But then how did he manage without cash, did it materialize like manna from heaven? How did Richard return? Even enthusiastic Sid asks that, but Foss lamely admits he didn’t ask his friend that. Didn’t ask that most essential obvious question? Didn’t ask lest the fantasy be blown away? It’s only the toilet connection remains to such tales. When Bruce himself starts travelling it’s to Sydney, Australia (he just knows that’s the place after shooting through the stars and passing through a door of light), but when he asks the Lord how to get back, God, who won’t let him see the Sydney he was so lifelong crazy to see, has to return through the bathroom door of the Sydney office high rise he’s in.

SID ROTH SHOULD AVOID BATHROOM ANGELS

I would advise the incorrigible Sid Roth to avoid all bath and restroom stories. This former New Ager who perhaps never quite got rid of his old gods and needs to have them washed out if not in a washroom, might as well belong to the god Pan for addiction to magic.

I recall how one of the modern doyennes of the occult centre of Findhorn worked her way and the organizations’ way to power via communications with Pan in the toilet. There’s nothing wrong with toilets except that they’re not kosher, they have been co-opted for the material realm. I have forgotten which guest it was some months back who mentioned but didn’t dwell on what struck me as a nonetheless bizarre point about angels who are so keen to accompany you around they are grinning at you in the bathroom or waiting at the toilet door as you exit. I suggest these aren’t angels. In the same way another guest, or perhaps it was the same one, had a tale about being in Mexico on a healing mission to a blind person and meeting a Jesus who got doubled over with helpless laughter. This wasn’t Jesus any more than the bathroom angels were angels. Nor is there real travel…just some psychic projection, if that.

Bruce promises to demonstrate his travel on this week’s show. Sid who can't wait to get moving admits he didn’t “travel” when Bruce seized his hand and concentrated on God and had found himself in some restaurant opposite where Sid had stayed in Jerusalem and perhaps sees or meets some waiter who works there. God has supposedly commissioned this bit of psychic trickery or just plain suggestibility to help the church. It’s all either illusion fit for party tricks or it’s demonic, one or the other, but it’s not of God.

I notice Sid began by saying he had been “freaking out” when he recently arrived in Mobile Alabama and was told at the hotel front desk he had been there in the same clothes saying the same things though Sid had never been to Mobile before. Of course it could be, and likely is, just mistaken identity; but if it truly is the spiritual phenomenon the would-be travelling Sid imagines, then he really had better start freaking out because the spirits are playing games and Lucifer is having the last laugh at quite so much undiscerning stupidity offered to the world in Christ’s name……for of course a “gift” of x dollars to have the latest book CD, course or whatever to get you travelling in the Glory. But of course if you suggested to these people that C.S. Lewis's Narnia which is reached through more enchanting doorways, was good reading for children they would protest you were as good as corrupting them with magic. The nonsense and the hypocrisy is almost more than sincerity and intelligence can stand.