Author: johnclaudio

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apologetics atheism

Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?

healing image.

I recently scanned over a ridiculous website called whywontgodhealamputees.com, run by “Marshall Brain.” Upon reading over it, I found what I expected to find, which was a flurry of rather simplistic and juvenile arguments against the existence of God. So I’m taking my shot here.

First of all, thousands upon thousands of amputees have been healed by God. God heals broken souls and spirits. He does this every day through his Holy Spirit. Each time it happens, it is a genuine and remarkable miracle. Bad people, thoroughly debauched and given over to evil– become saved and turn their life around, and experience a miraculous transformation at the heart level. This is actually the greatest evidence for God’s existence that there is.

This is not something to push away with a wave of the hand.

I have never seen a truly bad person have a change of heart except through a religious, spiritual experience with God. I have never heard or seen of a person struggling with a sexual sin overcoming it by anything but a miracle.

For example, in state after state, un-american leftists and socialist democrats have banned the use of secular and religious programs that help people overcome their sexual issues. They have recognized that all of their science and their whole psychological field is powerless and ineffective in helping these people, though they want to be helped.

Yet within the church, you will find former homosexuals and thousands upon thousands who overcome sexual fetishes. You will hear their testimonies and witness the newfound joy in their lives and on their faces.

You keep looking at missing arms and legs. I give you Nick Vujicic, missing arms and legs, he is a christian preacher and evangelist, who believes in physical healing, to boot!

What is it that secular atheists offer people with broken souls?

They offer them drugs. Anti-depressants. Anti-psychotics. They offer to fully transform them into drooling zombies.

They offer them bread, a monthly check from the government, a lonely existence on the margins of society.

They offer them a quick path to nihilism and existential sickness.

With all of their degrees, their higher learning, and all of their science, they have never once been able to turn a bad man into a good man. They have never once, in the history of mankind, been able to affect a real and lasting change of heart.

All they offer are new social programs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the money being poured into high crime areas for decades with no visible positive effects. They have built thousands of prisons for those sick in their souls. They have turned countless people suffering from anxiety into drug addicts, alcoholics and into the homeless.

They don’t have or possess the ability to heal anyone.

They have never witnessed a miracle or performed one because they don’t have the holy spirit of God inside of them.

A man who loses an arm or a leg is not sick. He is not in need of healing. Jesus himself said that it is better to be without a hand or arm than lose your eternal soul.

In all, they ignore the miracles that are all around them, focusing only on physical losses. They are the blind leading the blind. They have ears, but cannot hear. They have eyes, but do not see.

Part 2 is here!

If there is No God…
Faith Keeps the Human Race Going

A Thought on White Privilege

A link to the page of “Marshall Brain”

Categories
creative essays politics

Theory: Why Euro Nations can get away with Socialism, and we can’t.

feature image.

It has happened over and over. When talking to a democrat socialist or a liberal, they bring up the wonderful socialized health program in Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands or some other minor Eastern European country. If it can work there, then it can work here, they proudly affirm.

They never stop to really ask themselves why these countries can afford such experiments, and the United States can’t. But more importantly, they never stop to ask themselves why the world can afford to allow them these socialized institutions, but why the world cannot afford the United States taking on these kind of massive financial changes.

First, let us look at military power. The United States, at all times, is prepared to fight a war on three fronts at the same time. The US literally has a military capacity to fight 3 wars at once, with two other superpowers thrown in for good measure.

The size and scope of US military reach is astounding and mind-boggling. The US, for example, has 13, 683 military aircraft. To compare, this is more than the next 7 countries on the military superpower index COMBINED.

America has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The rest of the world combined has two.

The United States spends about $732 Billion on its military every year, which is almost as much as the next 10 countries combined.

These are important, if not critical facts. They are important because it is all necessary for world pace and stability. If the United States wasn’t making up this kind of slack, and if America reduced its massive military budget, western civilization itself would come into immediate jeopardy. Bad actors, with dreams of expansion and empire, like Russia and China, would seize on this weakening of the West’s defensive infrastructure and expand their global reach, either by projection or war.

In other words, the United States fields almost all of the military infrastructure of western democratic nations. They are, in some ways, the sacrificial lamb.

If America instituted the expensive and grand social experiments that others can only afford because of America’s assumed protection, who is going to pick up the slack then and stop the bad guys from destroying western civilization?

In those nations that these socialist programs exist in, do they also have the financial responsibility for a HUNDRED worldwide military bases, and a military geared for fighting 3 wars at once? Is the world looking TO THEM every time the shit break loose?

And if they don’t have those responsibilities, who–do you think, is going to take up the place of world leader once America goes into unrecoverable debt?

Certainly not China or Russia, right?

Right?

In all, these countries enjoy the capability to spend large proportions of their overall budgets on socialized medicine and free healthcare because they rely on the massive military power of the United States to ward off potential existential threats such as China or Russia. American power and projection across the globe keeps them in check. If America were to institute the same programs, they would, of necessity, have to decrease military spending and weaken the whole civilized world’s defensive posture against bad actors and nations. The rest of the free world would immediately become vulnerable and have to vastly increase their own military spending budgets. They might not be able to keep or maintain these expensive socialist programs financially.

This is one of the reasons why you generally see President Donald Trump constantly urging other Western nations to increase their overall contribution to matters of defense. He probably wants nothing more than to reduce military spending so that he can introduce Trumpcare and make his lasting mark on American history.

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creative essays revelation Uncategorized

How to Overcome the Lusts of the Flesh

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I’m not going to tell you to pray more. I’m not going to tell you to worship more, or begin a program of positive confession. I have tried all of this myself, and it doesn’t work. It seems like the flesh always has the upper hand, no matter what. It seems like sin will always out, always win.

I know the way it is. You pray aloud in your prayer closet. You play some worship music and worship the father in spirit and in truth. You are feeling good, ready to transform the whole world through faith, by love and charity.

25 minutes later you are watching porn.

Or you are cursing someone out over the phone.

Or you are flipping someone the finger on the highway.

Or you are ripping open a pack of cigarettes with your trembling hands.

Whatever the answers are, I knew that nobody has ever shared them with me. I was just told the same tropes over and over, to pray more, read my bible aloud, ask God for help, and so on. I decided this advice needed an updating. I would go to the Bible for the answers and search and seek until I found the answer, the solution to putting down the lusts of the flesh.

I new I had the answer when I read Galatians, chapter 5.

Galatians 5:16
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.

We are told to “walk by the spirit.” That is all well and good, but how are we to do that?

Imagine, for a second, that God was with you, walking with you, accompanying you everywhere. You could not escape Him. He was with you when you woke up in the morning and He was with you when you arrived home from work.

In that kind of situation, it would be difficult to sin. It would be hard to find a way to open up your laptop and watch porn, for example. But this concept is the key to overcoming the lusts of the flesh. You have to realize that God is always with you, always watching, always inside of you.

When you are aware, at all times and at every moment, that God’s precious Holy Spirit is in you and with you, throwing yourself headlong into a mortal sin will not be easy. For one, if you have a relationship with the holy spirit, as you should, you will not want to do anything that might grieve him.

This is why we are commanded to “walk in the spirit.” What that means is to develop a relationship with the Holy Ghost, so much so that you are aware of his nearness and presence at all times. It means to walk in the spirit, as in a marathon walk, and not just a morning jog, as it were.

Once you understand that you are never alone, you begin to act differently. Certain sins are impossible, and completely off the table. It is not that you don’t want to be a partaker in that sin, it is that you will not want to make the Holy Spirit a witness to that sin. And the only way to realize that you are never alone is to walk in the spirit.

Talk to the spirit. Speak to the person of the Holy Spirit. And listen to the spirit, for his guidance, for his comfort, for his help. He will always advocate action on your behalf. So don’t be afraid to start a relationship with him. That relationship is the key to everything.

Walk in the spirit.

How are you to ‘walk by the spirit’ if you cannot hear the direction of the spirit, if you cannot hear his voice?

The Word of the Spirit is the Bible. We must read the bible and listen to the Bible. Once we know the bible, we know the mind of Christ.

Coming to know the bible means coming to know the will of God for your life. It means coming to know the will and voice of the spirit.

This is literally the key to everything. If you can overcome the lusts of the flesh, you can overcome addiction, to food, to sugar, to carbohydrates, to drugs, to masturbation, to sex, to anything. I look back on my christian walk and realize that my body, my flesh, my physical temple has always been the number one enemy of happiness and peace for me.

Basically, you need a closer relationship with God. You need to feel that God is with you at all times, because He is. You need to have a constant sense of communion with the Holy Spirit inside of you, at all times. This is the key element to overcoming lustful practices.

Get to know God’s presence. Get to feel His presence with you, become aware of it always. Become more God-conscious and less sin-conscious, less flesh conscious. And you will sin less, and cave less to the desires of the body. You will become more “spiritual,” as it were, which should be your ultimate goal, to “walk in the spirit.”

This is the key to overcoming the lusts of the flesh, as much as it can be overcome, because we won’t fully overcome those lusts while we are “in the body” as Saint Paul says. Many may have to marry, even young, in order not to burn with sinful desires. This is another overlooked solution, due to our modern cultural climate, which sees marriage as a thing that should be put off until your 30s.

Fact is, throughout all of human history, men and women were marrying young, for over 50,000 years. The truth is that we were built for our child-raring years to be in our late teens and early 20s, when out fertility levels are the highest, and our energy levels almost inexhaustible.

Better to marry than to burn, as Paul and Christ said. But better to be married to the Holy Spirit, first.

Why the Left LOVES Civil Disorder

If there is No God… Faith Keeps the Human Race Going

A Thought on White Privilege

Categories
apologetics atheism Uncategorized

Why Atheism is Wrong in Two Worlds

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We have all heard about the “assumption of atheism.” It is the idea that, all things being equal, one is born with an assumption of atheism, and that this is man’s initial resting state, as it were. This post is not designed to be a logical rebuttal to this idea, as William Lane Craig has annihilated this premise here. But in thinking about this, it is difficult for me to imagine a world where atheism comes naturally, in fact. So what we have here is a tale of two worlds.

The first world is pre-industrial. You are born before the titans of industry, before the highways and automobiles and the airplanes and the digital age. Before the theory of evolution, before Einstein, before the professional naturalists and trained philosophers. All we had was common sense, accumulated wisdom in holy texts, and a wide array of philosophies in their infancy stages We herded sheep and made campfires. We sharpened sticks, slept on rooftops, and some even lived in caves.

In this world, superstition is prevalent.We know this as a historical fact. Hell, even cro magnum man and the neanderthals showed signs of having superstitious beliefs and afterlife ideas about death. I’m not sure that atheists will challenge this idea. If you were born in these times, it is likely you would believe in gods, the arrangements of funereal stones, the afterlife, and some form of magic or prayer.

It is interesting to note that we find religion appearing in different parts of the world, independent from each other.

So, let us fast-forward to today.

Atheists don’t see God anywhere, or room for superstition anywhere in our modern world of big tech, big science, theoretical scientists and modern philosophical thought. Though, to be fair, more than a billion people do. The common atheist line here is that the common man is uneducated, ignorant, clinging to his relics, religion, the bible, and his guns. The modern evangelistic atheist is an elitist, privileged to hold beliefs that the common man isn’t savvy enough to own, and capable of affording a belief system that the lumpen masses cannot.

Everything can be explained, they might say. They speak of the “god of the gaps,” which is the idea that in the gaps of our knowledge of how the world and the universe works, believers use God to fill in those gaps. They also claim that these gaps are becoming smaller and thinner all of the time. They speak of the march of knowledge, even.

But the point is, even in today’s world of science and discovery, there is a lot of room for belief in God. Because with the progress of science, theology itself has kept pace, arm in arm and neck in neck. Theology has evolved and matured with the advance of secular knowledge. In fact, in my opinion, they have not merely kept pace, but superseded the march of atheism.

Right off the top of my head, I can come up with 4 or 5 arguments for the existence of God, all taken seriously in academic, theological and philosophical studies. There are new arguments arising each year. Even old, antiquated arguments that are hundreds of years old are being constantly resurrected, updated, upgraded and being thrown back into play. I have two posts right here at John Claudio world where I creatively free write and document reasons to believe, some questionable and others not.

So basically, in all, when you consider all of the philosophical arguments, the prophetic evidence, the witness of personal testimonies, and all of the modern-day logical work, you find that, in some ways, faith in God is easier to justify today than it was 1,000 tears ago. 1,000 years ago, God only had gap-filling power, much like the theories of atheists today. In today’s world, you have a plethora of arguments in the positive for the existence of a God, that don’t seek to be explanatory, or gap-fillers, but seek to prove, through logic, philosophy and theological work, that God exists and Jesus is the Son of God.

There are more and better reasons to believe in God now, than there were in the old, ancient world.

The fact that the old philosophical formulas are still in widespread use today by theologians and philosophers are evidence of their natural, long-term immunity to serious critique. Instead of dying off, they have grown stronger and become more-defined through time. They have been strengthened by opposition, and some of their formulations have evolved under scrutiny, but still they persist to exist as a gadfly in the atheist’s ointment.

This is hardly an exhaustive list, but here are 8 arguments for the existence of God.

  1. The cosmological Argument
  2. The moral argument
  3. The teleological argument
  4. The Ontological argument
  5. The argument from Design
  6. The argument from Consciousness
  7. The argument from Testimony
  8. The Argument from Faith

Here is a small list of helpful philosophical resources:

William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith.

Inspiring Philosophy’s You Tube channel.

Christian Philosopher Robert Koons.

How an Atheist Argued His Way Back to Christianity
Reasons to Believe
A New Argument for the Existence of God

Categories
creative essays Uncategorized

But my Loved Ones are Going to Hell!

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I was watching William Lane Craig do a Q&A session when a Christian asked him about unsaved loved ones, and how to have joy when they are on the road to hell. They also asked about how to deal with the question of a “good God” sending people to hell. His answer was twofold.

He made the point that we should focus instead on God’s grace toward us, and be appreciative. I didn’t like the answer, as it seemed a bit self-serving for my taste. He also pointed out that we are ALL deserving, or worthy of hell, and we should focus instead on their salvation, and our efforts toward the accomplishment of that objective. Here I can find a point of agreement.

The idea of loved ones and family members going to hell should provoke us into fervent action on their behalf, through prayer, through witnessing, by setting a good, Christian example and making a shining light of our lives. In my opinion, whenever there is a principle or truth in the kingdom of God, there is a point to that principle or truth. For example, Jesus said that the Sabbath was made FOR MAN. Man was not created for the Sabbath day.

But I think what is being missed in all of these responses is an appreciation for God, who is love. Love is patient, we are told. Love is kind. Love forgives. Love overlooks wrongs and is compassionate. And God *is* love. We should never assume that our sense of love is greater than God’s. This is never a point of conflict that we should have in our heads, or in our hearts. God is love, and He will act out of Love.

The Bible also tell us that God is just. We must always keep this in the forefront of our minds while considering these challenging matters. We must trust that God will do what is fair and just. It is not for us to judge, but God is the judge, and we would do well to confess that He is a fair and honest judge of people’s hearts and souls. Trust in God means to trust his righteous judgment, also.

Now, there is one other matter I want to address, and that is the idea that a person can sanctify an unbeliever who is immediate family. We know that a believing wife can sanctify her unsaved husband, and vice versa. The verse is here:

For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband. 1 Corinthians 7:14

This idea makes a certain bit of sense, if you think about it. When a man and woman come together in marriage, they become one person, and the two become one. It wouldn’t make sense for only half a person to be sanctified.

However, sanctification is not salvation. It does not mean to be saved. We know this because just two verse later Paul provides this context:

“How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?”

I do not think anything is impossible with God. Jesus says as much when he is talking about rich people going to heaven, and though it is unlikely that your loved ones will be saved because you prayed for them, you can always hold out hope.

In the Old Testament, it is recorded that Job prayed for the sins of his sons, constantly, and sacrificed on their behalf.

In the Old Testament we also find Abraham pleading the case for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We also find God appearing to save Lot’s life because of just this kind of intercessory prayer, also.

So, in all, just remember that God is just. He is fair. We believe in His love, His mercy, His grace and kindness. God will always do the right thing. He will always do the just thing.

Trust in his goodness. Have faith in his righteousness. Believe in his goodness and mercy at all times.

This is the hope of our faith, and it is important not to forget it.

Read my article on White Privilege Debunked

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Civil War is Here.