God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

Here are three testimonies of Muslims who had revelations and visions of Jesus Christ. Each is about half an hour long. The first is Afshin Javid, an Iranian who joined Hezbollah Jihad in order to please Allah. He says that there is not one verse in the Quran about Mohammed being in heaven because all are waiting for the final judgement day, but after two weeks of asking God to show him what to do, Jesus Christ came to him in prison and said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He shocked this young man by telling him that he is forgiven, and that just for asking, not for doing expected religious deeds like killing people or praying 5 times a day. Jesus told him that he could forgive other Muslim people, but someone needs to go tell them. https://youtu.be/NXR3N2C2k0w The second is Jerry Rassamni, a Druse Muslim, born in Lebanon. He read the Bible and realized that there are many names of Allah in the Quran, but not one is about love and not one is Father. Jerry saw the...

Other than the Bible, of course. A friend recently recommended a book called Making Sense of the Bible, by Adam Hamilton. It sounded intriguing, so I ordered it, read it, and was amazed. The author is a United Methodist pastor, a founder of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. The jacket blurb states, “The church is well known for connecting with agnostics, skeptics, and spiritual seekers. In 2012, it was recognized as the most influential mainline church in America, and Hamilton was asked by the White House to deliver the sermon at the inaugural Obama prayer service.” His church has 18,000 members, and no wonder! The book is divided into two parts, but at the end of Part 1 there is a hermeneutic section that I intend to present here in detail. Part 1 is the stuff one learns in seminary: who wrote the Old and New Testaments? When were they written? Which books made it into the Bible, and why were other books rejected? He writes extensively about the Bible authors, Paul, ...

(See Dec. 15, 2012 for other random stories of the paranormal that I've heard firsthand.) At a recent Sacramento MUFON meeting a gentleman sitting next to me named Steve shared the fact that he is sure he is an abductee because he awakes in the morning with scratches and marks on his body. He spent many years in a fundamentalist Christian church and still considers himself to be born again. Whenever he has doubts about his faith, he reminds himself that he has often blocked paranormal manifestations by using the name of Jesus. The homes of abductees are often ‘haunted’ by random poltergeist manifestations. He was once using a Ouija Board with a friend. He thought she was pushing the pointer, she thought he was. When they asked a question, there was no hesitation; the pointer went straight to the answer. He finally asked, “Are you malevolent?” It shot over to “Yes.” That was the last time he used a Ouija. As I listened to his many stories, I kept wondering why, if he is a Christi...

What was the Hebrew author trying to accomplish? Having looked at the Genesis account and compared it to the Ziusudra Epic, what are we to do with it who live by the Bible and acknowledge its inspiration? I suggest we try to walk in the shoes of the earthly author and try to understand what his motivations may have been. He lived in the era of the kings of Israel. No, Moses did not write the book of Genesis. The phrase, …such and such happened when there were no kings in Israel is oft repeated. That is a clue that the book was written when there were kings in Israel. He lived in a polytheistic world with goddesses, ghosts, snakes, sacred gardens, and sacred trees [beneath which blasphemy and unholy arts were practiced]. Our author knew beyond all shadow of a doubt that participating in those customs brought spiritual death to the worshiper. Many of his own people followed those very gods. The Canaanites legends of Baal and the monstrous world of Mesopotamian deities were well-kn...

Where did the ark land? In two recent posts I discussed Robert Best’s self-published book Noah’s Ark and the Ziusudra Epic, 1999, distributed by Eisenbrauns. This post follows on those and it is recommended that the reader refer to them before reading this one. For this post I also referred to Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET). In the original Sumerian epic, Ziusudra is a king in Mesopotamia (ANET, 42; Best, 256), but most of the narrative has been destroyed. According to one of the Sumerian King Lists, (ANET, 265) the king in Sumer at the time of the Flood was Ubar-Tutu, King of Shuruppak. In another, it’s Ziusudra (Best, 125). He probably lived sometime in the third millennium BCE (Best offers a flood near Shuruppak in 2900 BCE.) In the assembly of the gods, Anu and Enlil commanded that the kingship and rule of mankind should come to an end. Other deities lament, and Enki warns Ziusudra to build a boat to save himself and the seed of an...