A THREAD ON THE VACCINE

1/10 If you are struggling to know whether to get the vaccine, may I offer the following line of reasoning for your consideration? 2/10 If it does not violate the moral law of God and therefore is not a matter of sin and religious liberty, and you want to be taken seriously when the real religious liberty threat arises,

1/7 A corporation is a money-making machine. Until recently in history, corporations could only make money by manipulating matter (wood, stone, metals, minerals, etc) to extract profits. Now corporations can make money by manipulating human perceptions, feelings, and decisions. 2/7 Testifying to Congress, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistle blower, charges that Facebook puts "astronomical profits before people... Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy...destabilize democracy.” What!?

This does not qualify as a sonnet, but I don't have the energy to be that precise right now. Hopefully this ministers to your heavy heart. @JenniferJillS @kreyne @EliseHarboldt 1/8 ON PRESENT STAGE

Lord God Almighty, ineffably holy,
Great in weakness, immeasurably lowly,
From the corner of my eye, I see You moving,
My broken heart runs, yet still You're pursuing
2/8

1/6 The Bible is full of poetry. Sixteen books are composed entirely of poetry. Fourteen other books have a high percentage of poetry. Only 7 of its 66 books have no poetry. 2/6 Yet many people are unaware that much of the Bible is poetry and song, because the way teachers and preachers deliver the Bible to people is largely in the fragmented form of prooftext arguments, which is a way of thinking and communicating that is foreign to the prophets.

A few thoughts on the Ravi Zacharias scandal:

1/7 One of the repeated warnings of the Bible is that bad men will use the good news of Christ as a means of preying upon vulnerable people. They are called “wolves in sheep’s clothing." #RaviZacharias 2/7 Jesus is so attractive & the gospel is so powerful, it is inevitable that predators & shysters will harness His beauty & potency for their evil aims. They are frauds. He is not. The disguise they wear is effective precisely because of the truth it represents. #RaviZacharias

1/5 A key premise of Revelation is that America, while posing as a “lamb,” actually operates by the principles of the “dragon.” That is, America is not a Christian nation, but rather a modern incarnation of Rome. 2/5 Rome was defined as a legal political system called a “Republic” and was governed by a representative body called a “Senate,” which gave the surface appearance that the government existed for the “public.” America, too, is a Republic and hence a kind of modern Rome.

1/8 At the deepest core level, peeling back the layers of all our ills as human beings, we are collectively, generationally traumatized by bad religion, through which an abusive, authoritarian, arbitrary picture of God has been imposed upon the world. 2/8 Of the 7.8 Billion people on the planet, 1.2B are Catholic, 1B are Protestant, 1.8B are Muslim. This means that 4B humans have been raised to believe that God predetermines who is saved and who is lost and that the lost will be tortured in flames for all eternity.

1/5 Rolling Stone Magazine just released its new list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and Seventh-day Adventist theology, in a roundabout way, occupies the number 1 slot. Marvin Gaye’s, "What’s Going On," has been named by Rolling Stone the greatest album of all time. 2/5 According to encyclopedia.com, “Gaye was the second of four children of Alberta and Marvin Gay, Sr., who were devout Seventh-day Adventists.” Gaye's father became a House of God minister, a spin off of the Adventist church, while retaining key Adventists beliefs.

1/10 Representing the norm, a pastor said to me, “My leaders measure my success by how many baptisms I get, and the method I’m required to use is an evangelistic series in which I or a hired evangelist will quote strings of Bible verses to convince people that we have the truth.” 2/10 He continued, “Each year I do one of these evangelistic events hoping against hope that people will come night after night for 4 weeks and that at least a few people will get baptized. Year after year fewer people come and if I baptize a church member’s children, I’m lucky.”

I woke this morning with a question on my mind. What are the very best experiences I’ve ever had in life? Here are the top three: 1. being in love with a person I know well enough to trust entirely and yet not enough to remove mystery

1/6 Over the weekend, John MacArthur insisted that you can’t be a Christian and vote Democrat, that voting Republican is equivalent to being a Christian. Without any political agenda of my own, may I offer for your consideration the prophetic point of view. 2/6 According to the book of Revelation, the world will end by means of a majority voting block of Christians creating a zero sum game in which allegiance to the state and to God will be made equivalent.

1/10 A BIOHACKING THREAD
I’ve been a biohacker since I was 13. I highly recommend you become acutely aware of your body & all its functions. The best way to do this is to subject your body to new experiences of safe, beneficial stress & pay attention to your biological responses. 2/10 Why? Well, because acute biological awareness increases mental, emotional, and relational awareness. And heightened awareness of biological and psychological phenomena—when triggered in healthy and safe ways—increases the quality, sensitivity, and joy of one’s life.

1/7 A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence is. . .

How would you complete that sentence?

How would you define intelligence?

I will suggest an outlier definition:

Intelligence is the measure of a person’s capacity to love.

Weird definition, I know. But hear me out. 2/7 It is becoming increasingly apparent that there is a direct correlation between selfishness and stupidity. Selfishness narrows my field of vision and blocks out or distorts information that would require of me what I am not willing to give for the sake of others.

1/4 I've been traveling by air most weeks of my adult life. For 7 years I inhaled secondhand smoke on those flights. Until 1990, it was legal to smoke on commercial airplanes. It was regarded as the smoker’s right or freedom to endanger the health of everybody else around them. 2/4 When airlines banned smoking on flights, it was common to witness angry smokers shouting at flight attendants about their freedoms and rights, oblivious to the fact that they were the ones violating the freedoms and rights of those they were forcing to endanger their health.

If I understand four foundation principles, I have the raw conceptual materials from which to deduce my own answers to all significant issues. If I merely ponder everyone else's ideas and answers, I will always be moving from one version of confusion to another. Here we go: Foundational Principle #1
LOVE
All things are connected and interdependent. There is no such thing as an isolated phenomenon. Giving triggers giving, resulting in more & more. Taking triggers taking, resulting in less & less. Love is the law of eternal expansion and flourishing.

THE ANATOMY OF A PROTEST
Please resist the temptation to write off the protest as wrong because of the wrong elements that attempt to hijack its voice. A protest is a complex social phenomenon composed of a mixed multitude, including at least the following five groups: 1. PEACEFUL PROTESTERS
These are the people who initiate the protest and have no intention of participating in or inciting violence. They simply want to communicate clearly and powerfully to those in authority that the injustices they are protesting must be righted.

1/7 No, rioting and looting and burning buildings is not right, but it feels right in the absence of the right people long for, and that’s the psychology that is playing out here. #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd 2/7 We can condemn the rioters as “thugs” and bring greater violence upon them, or we can read the story of their pain in the flames they ignite and interpret their retaliation as the messy cry for justice it really is. #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd

1/6 The biblical narrative thinks in terms of corporate solidarity. That which impacts one, impacts all. If one person suffers, we all suffer. If one rejoices, we all rejoice. If one sins, we’re all implicated. If one does what’s right, we’re all affected. 2/6 Paul reasons out the gospel of the premise of corporate solidarity. By one man, Adam, we all became sinners. Guilt is universal. But by one man, Christ, all are cleared of guilt and made righteous. Righteousness is universal.

Let’s play a quarantine game. I’ll post 5 Tweets describing common things. The first person to Tweet the right answer for each one will receive a special gift in the mail from me, and I mean speeeeecial. Only one win allowed per person. Ready, set, go! 1
What is an…
edible crunchy grease sponge?

1/16 It’s a miracle of grace that Sue and I are still married and deeply in love. It’s a miracle of grace that I didn’t destroy our children and that they genuinely like me. My life was supposed to be a complete disaster. I’ll explain. #QuarantineContemplations 2/16 My dad didn’t want kids, so the day I was born he ran. My mom married another guy—handsome, charismatic, likable—who punched her the first time on their honeymoon. The beatings continued for eight years, driving her into alcoholism & drug addiction. #QuarantineContemplations