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The closer you get to good and truth...

The closer you get to anything good, true, or beautiful in this world, the more counterfeits swarm around it in order instinctively to occlude it; & these counterfeits all pander to some yearning to commit evil or wallow in falsehood which is more attractive to enormous numbers.  It is like that proto-scifi and cosmic horror novel The Night Land, where all of surviving humanity resides in two something like geothermally-powered pyramids; and monsters abound in dense profusion around them to destroy them, like the dragon waiting to devour the child in the book of Revelation. The 2nd Coming inspired an explosion of counterfeits which in their variety pander to the various ways the masses of humanity do not want unadulterated good and truth. Rather, they want mediated good and truth which leaves more of their sin and error alone. This is for instance why Kardec's spiritualism has so many millions of followers, which contains a few correct teachings from the New Church about charit...
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Fire and water are come into my soul

The Word contains many instances of fire and water in close association because purification processes of temptation/bitterness/affliction involve cleaning the will & the understanding with internal tests. Tests designed to make you a decent and loving person in God's sight. Let everyone who would be truly loving pass through fire and water; being purified as to their will & behavior, understanding & utterance as I, microcosm, also pass through fire and water. It is fire and water which cleanse the inside of the plate and the cup for His bread & wine Let everyone pass through fire and water who would end up in a wealthy place. How often hath it afflicted him? From a child. From a spiritual child. From the fire and water processes which follow our spiritual birth as a believer in the Church. Pass through the fire what is for the fire, and through the water what is for the  water. Answer the strident thoughtforms of recurrent sins and errors within us with truths from...
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The living joy is Jesus Christ

The living joy like music that loved me and everyone made it clear to me that it was God, Jesus, the God of the Bible. It is recognizably one intricately, oceanically intelligent and loving being perfectly identical with the risen Jesus Christ. It is the "joy unspeakable and full of glory" of which Peter speaks. And the recognizable characteristic of that glory is its inseparability from divine truth and from being taught by divine truth. It is this glory which one found in the Writings and knew on sight to be authentic concerning the Presence. After learning that Jesus, God, the God of the Bible was real, I read the Bible fully for the first time; and I found that verse of Peter's about "joy unspeakable and full of glory" and knew it to be authentic material about the presence of the Lord. It is the same voice which I recognize. His sheep hear His voice. There is a particular humiliation in the presence of the Lord that is uplifting rather than disheartening; t...
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We are as riddled with chiastic structures as the Word!

Just as it is easier to swallow bread with wine or some other beverage, so is it easier to make love of God and the neighbor (bread) part of oneself if instructed in the spiritual truth which teaches that love (wine). We learn truth about love rather earlier than we particularly practice that love, because our fallen natures, the old man, are reluctant to give way to the new creation in Christ, the new man. This is why light was created long before the Sun and Moon: because spiritual enlightenment precedes particularly noteworthy, actual expression of love and wisdom in a ripening believer's life.  Gradually we go further and further within as though we were gradually removing layers from the rotten onion of self love. The person who ceases to boast on the outside may, as it were, still have to confront the 'big bosses' of ever more interior expressions of that particular sin.  The person who boasts on the outside may, as it were, boast on the inside; and ever more inside. ...
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Explaining Bread & Wine to Muslims & Buddhists

 In Arcana Coelestia we read:  "The ancients divided the neighbour into different categories, giving each category one of the names that describe those in the world who are plainly in the greatest need of help. They also taught how charity should be exercised towards those belonging to one category and towards those belonging to another. In this way they organized their teachings; and they regulated their lives in accordance with those teachings" (AC6705). If we are to take the Lord's advice to cast our nets to the right side of the boat, which means evangelizing and proselytizing charitably, then we will surely want an appropriate way to evangelize to, for instance, Muslims or Buddhists. One has a developed system of tools for New Church evangelization to Muslims -- here and elsewhere --which spring from a desire to engage in positive, sharing, mutually-enriching evangelization. It is how one conceives of bringing the religions of the world to sit at the Divine Human...
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Episodic characterization as the real reason for supposed "contradictions"

Episodic characterization differs enormously from novelistic characterization, a common expectation modern people project on the Word of God. Episodic characterization involves things like the stories of Ananzi in Africa, where he will face first one challenge then another; but not really 'remember what he did last Friday'. Or again, it involves things like Archie Comics or X-Men or Donald Duck: do these characters 'remember what they did last Friday'?  Or do they more seem to have the memories of goldfish and live for the first time in each story about them? This sense that the character has the memory of a goldfish is one of the defining features of episodic characterization, which typically uses characters to express a definite moral or spiritual message; not to worry about character consistency between different stories, especially not as much. For sometimes there will be traces of both characterological consistency and memories of goldfish in the exact same text.  ...
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Bitterness and the Two Minutes Hate

 As a preacher I will not tell you whom you should vote for. But I will tell you that the 2 Minutes Hate mentioned in Orwell's 1984 happens all around you recurrently. You are regularly invited to hate particular public figures. Be alert for the temptation to hate and thus to break the commandment "Thou shalt not kill"; because this has consequences in relation to your forever home and your forever neighborhood.  When we arrive at forks in the road in which we get angry at first one person or group than another, we must be alert. For the hells will certainly offer us the poison chalice of hatred, or that of contempt, or that of depreciation, or that of inner false witness which sees only the faults of others the better to dismiss them utterly. We will be invited by society to hate each President in turn, in one's native land; so that we had or have an Orange Man Bad campaign and a Let's Go Brandon campaign. In each of these cases, we have panderers to the sin of h...
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