The Gun Lap

©2022 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com

#FirstCuppaJoe for Tue Sep 13 (thread)

When you’re looking at the realistic possibility that you might be dead in a few months, you try to make the best of the short time that might be left. You PRIORITIZE… Big Time! For Warren Zevon it was eking-out that, ONE, last album—for me, it’s leaving behind some words that will help to free human beings from organized “religion.”
They say, “There are no Atheists in a foxhole.” I guess there are no agnostics either, judging from my own on-going experience, in the Cancer foxhole. God’s been revealed to me by the tremendous OUTPOURING of love & support—both here on Twitter and amongst long-time friends & family—by people, whom I hadn’t heard from in 3 years, who didn’t know about my cancer calling me, Monday, just 3 hours after I’d mentioned to God, in a prayer,that I realized how He often works through ordinary human beings to supply needed help or support.
I had 25 years in a HIGHLY organized religion. As far as any danger to the world, it was rather bland, aside from its extreme skill at recruiting new members as “worker bees”so that it could afford to recruit more worker-bees, in order to support the beyond-lavish lifestyles of its founder-guru & his heir-apparent son.
But there TRULY are organized religions & religious organizations, which ARE a #ClearAndPresentDanger to humanity. On Sunday, Sept 11, we stopped and grimly meditated on the work of one of those religious organizations.
The atrocity of 9/11, and most other religiously-propelled atrocities like it, has its origins in SOMONE’S INTERPRETATION of multiple-thousands-of-years-old, dog-eared, parchment scrolls, which self-proclaim to be the exact words of the Creator. Even ignoring the hundreds of translations and compilations since then, and going back to the original scrolls, requires some interpretation. Try reading the direct, word-for-word translation of the New Testament Greek in Nestle’s Interlinear Translation of the original text. It sometimes makes little sense when the English is read word-for-word from First Century “Koine” Greek. INTERPRETATION is even needed when translating directly into Modern English.
My point is this…
In my opinion, ANYONE currently in any organized religion needs to realize that — although God may have INSPIRED the original authors of a given “holy book”— without someone’s interpretation, the doctrines of your particular organization would be impossible. The God who sends these human “angels,” when we are down, also gave you MIRACULOUS powers of logic. USE THEM. Do your own “interpretation” of the religiously-imposed “interpretations” of your church elders. As the God in a friend’s NDE said, “The answer is LOVE!” Measure what your religious leaders tell you against that ONE standard: Does it promote LOVE?

7:08 AM · Sep 13, 2022
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