The young man who came into the exercise room looked to be
about 16 years old. He looked athletic, but the moment that he sat down to
work on the Lat Machine, it was clear he didn't know what he was doing. For
one thing, he was sitting with his back to the weights, facing outward. This
was not a good thing. He might injure himself. If he didn't injure himself, he
would, at minimum, be setting his musculature in a direction whose destination
would not be pleasing to him. I couldn't stand it. For humanitarian purposes I
set about to interfere with his workout. I might not look that fit, but I know
how to do the exercises. I showed him how to do the exercise properly: Face
the machine and pull the bar with a straight back, either to the back of the
shoulders or to the chest; exhale pulling the bar down and inhale on the way
back up so there will be enough oxygen to do the next repetition. With this
regimen, the muscles will be trained properly for optimum results.
There are great advantages to doing things right. The
Universe works such that if you do the same things under the same
circumstances, you will normally get approximately the same results. If you
follow the rules of the Universe, you will generally get what you set out to
achieve, minus a tithe of entropy, which the Universe always takes to keep for
itself. If you decide to cheat, the Universe won't care--you just won't get
what you want.
In politics, things work almost exactly the opposite. While
you can't lie to the Universe and get away with it, you can lie to people.
Abraham Lincoln said,
"You can fool some of the people some of the time, you can
fool some of the people all the time, you can fool all of the people some of
the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time".
Many of us sit here in 2004 and wonder if Abraham Lincoln
was talking about, what with Enron, Global Crossings, Arthur Andersen. The truth is that Lincoln was right, but the people who aren't
fooled don't matter because they don't have the power to do anything about the
truth they know. You can know the truth about the scoundrels, but it won't
make any difference because they still have all that money and you don't and
there's not one thing you can do about it. Brilliant scientists work for huge
conglomerates and are forced to do some of the things most reprehensible to
them if they want to continue to have a salary. The same thing can be said for
some of the ministers in the Churches of God. Politics can often make cowards
of us all if we do not have the integrity to do the right thing.
It is my belief that it is more important to be in line
with the principles of the Universe rather than with liars, thieves and
murderers because the Universe is going to be around a whole lot longer than
the scoundrels and really has a lot more to offer after all that is said and
done. Not only that, but after all that is said and done, you will win people
over with solid relationships in the long term. It might not be all that
appealing in the short term to choose substance over image, but at the end of
the day, I believe it is better to have integrity with principles and
standards rather than choose empty materialism. Not everyone will make that
choice and I believe that it is their loss.
Certainly, proper form will enable us to resolve problems
and challenges more quickly, permanently and consistently than applying random
chaos. Kenneth Clark, in his book Civilisation said:
I believe that order is better than chaos,
creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness
to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance,
and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.... For
example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other
people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember
that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All
living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the
God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes
their existence possible....
And yet when I look at the world about me in
the light of this series, I don’t at all feel that we are entering a new
period of barbarism. The things that made the Dark Ages so dark – the
isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness –
don’t obtain at all.... [B]right-minded young people think poorly of existing
institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn’t need to be young to
dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest
ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilisation is to
survive society must somehow be made to work....
Our other speciality is our urge to
destruction. With the help of machines we did our best to destroy ourselves in
two wars, and in doing so we released a flood of evil, which intelligent
people have tried to justify with praise of violence, ‘theatres of cruelty’
and so forth. . . . And one must concede that the future of civilisation does
not look very bright.
It is my belief that "the future of civilisation does not
look very bright" because the politics of those aforementioned institutions
has brought chaos from order, destruction from creation, ignorance out of
knowledge, narcissism out of sympathy, rudeness out of courtesy and is set on
a course to make nincompoops out of geniuses with a flood of evil with
violence, cruelty and abuse. Furthermore, I believe that the future of the
Churches of God does not look very bright because they have abandoned all the
rules and principles which are commonly accepted in society today. Churches
which allow stalkers and ministers who touch female teenagers in the church
inappropriately, do not deserve an existence when they cover up the incidents.
Somehow, allowing loaded guns in services is less than civilized, particularly
when they just happened to be carried by bodyguards for 'The End Time Apostle'
or a mentally ill married stalker pursuing a single woman for marriage in the church.
Breaking congregational covenants with impunity does not bode well for the
continued existence of a church.
Some of the Churches of God allow homosexuals in their midst to
wallow in their past thinking habits. They promote support groups to endlessly
remind people of their weaknesses so they will never truly be able to overcome
them and leave them behind. They claim to have the Holy Spirit and deny the
Power of it while 'the unconverted' continue to stop smoking permanently, give
up alcohol and even put the homosexual lifestyle behind them to go on to
marry--all without 'the Power of the Holy Spirit'--using Rational Recovery.
Atheists forgive their enemies and those who despitefully use them because it
works for them. Denying the power of the Holy Spirit is blaspheming it and
leads to the unpardonable sin because if the power is not there to repent of
the sin, it cannot be forgiven.
The result of all this appears to be that the Churches of
God have become little more than social clubs because they do not exercise
faith, nor do they keep the Commandments of God as given by the Scriptures. If
they would do this, they would not be continually losing members and abuse
would disappear. Their faith is little more than a vague hope, not
substantiated with an execution of proper form.
For the Churches of God, proper form would include:
