{"id":2238,"date":"2021-03-01T11:01:52","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T10:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/?p=2238"},"modified":"2021-03-01T11:47:17","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T10:47:17","slug":"wrestling-with-the-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wrestling-with-the-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"Wrestling with the beast"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has recently been major fallout in the Christian circles regarding the Ravi Zacharias scandal<\/a>, revealed after his death last year.<\/p>\n

For those who don\u2019t know, Ravi Zacharias is one of those American evangelists; you know the kind: saved by Jesus, because you need to accept Jesus as your personal savior because no salvation is possible otherwise, et cetera, ad nauseam.<\/p>\n

Let me quote from the Christian site I linked above:<\/p>\n

\n

Zacharias used tens of thousands of dollars of ministry funds dedicated to a \u201chumanitarian effort\u201d to pay four massage therapists, providing them housing, schooling, and monthly support for extended periods of time, according to investigators.<\/em><\/p>\n

One woman told the investigators that \u201cafter he arranged for the ministry to provide her with financial support, he required sex from her.\u201d She called it rape.<\/em><\/p>\n

She said Zacharias \u201cmade her pray with him to thank God for the \u2018opportunity\u2019 they both received\u201d and, as with other victims, \u201ccalled her his \u2018reward\u2019 for living a life of service to God,\u201d the report says. Zacharias warned the woman\u2014a fellow believer\u2014if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged.<\/em><\/p>\n

The findings, alongside details revealed\u00a0over months of internal reckoning at RZIM<\/a>, challenge the picture many have had of Zacharias.<\/em><\/p>\n

When he died in May, he was praised for his faithful witness, his commitment to the truth, and his personal integrity. Now it is clear that, offstage, the man so long admired by Christians around the world abused numerous women and manipulated those around him to turn a blind eye.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You get the picture. Some will say he \u201cfell into temptation\u201d, but from what I could see looking at the reports, he\u2019s actually the one who manipulated others into temptation, mostly by using his charisma and willpower to force them into doing his will. He doesn\u2019t look like an otherwise saintly person who fell into temptation, he looks like a manipulative, self-serving pig of a man; a \u201creligious\u201d Harvey Weinstein<\/a>. But the man himself hardly matters.<\/p>\n

The reason why his sleezy crimes and misbehaviors managed to remain secret until after his death is, to quote the argument from the man himself, \u201cif she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged\u201d. Basically, if it turned out that the great Christian apologist who is berating everyone into accepting Christ as a personal savior because there is no other way of salvation, manifested more signs of being a power-drunk piece of human garbage than someone in whom salvation could be witnessed, one could conclude that the entirety of this teaching is dubious.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been warning Christians about this, but they are incredibly arrogant, probably because they are intoxicated by the ego-trip of being on the right side of salvation and being the ones that preach from the high ground. It\u2019s incredibly seductive, I know, but it doesn\u2019t excuse them. I\u2019ve been hearing the same thing from them for decades \u2013 how their Church is somehow shielded from spiritual fall by the Holy Spirit because it\u2019s the holy fianc\u00e9e of Christ, how the Pope is personally appointed by the Holy Spirit and you are protected from false teachings and spiritual fall if you are a faithful member of the Church. I steadfastly reminded them that nobody can protect you from your own spiritual failings and you depend on yourself alone to establish a personal connection and relationship with God, and to defend and confirm this relationship with your daily actions, with every thought and every breath. They thought I was the deluded one, that I am the one who needs to come to his senses and accept the \u201ctruth\u201d. Then they elected that terrible leftist demagogue as the Pope, because the Church was so full of homosexuals and pedophiles that the previous saintly Pope resigned because he faced such stringent opposition to his attempts to purify the Church, he probably surrendered everything to God, as a good saint that he is, and left them to God\u2019s judgment. The Christians would probably call his successor the Antichrist, but I don\u2019t think Antichrist is a person; it\u2019s a spirit of \u201cprogressivism\u201d and humanistic materialism that is a direct opposition to the teaching of Christ, and as such is literally anti-Christ. However, it\u2019s not that people have ideologies \u2013 ideologies, in fact, have people who are possessed by them, and that Francis creature is obviously possessed by progressivism. Now, apparently, the Catholics are more aware that they have a problem, because their very dogma is being actively changed by that creature, and being safe from false teachings isn\u2019t something they would brag about very loudly, if they had any sense in them.<\/p>\n

The protestant Christians can of course use this opportunity to mock the Catholics for having a fallible man as a safeguard of their theology, while they \u201chave Christ\u201d, and thus they have \u201ccertainty of salvation\u201d.<\/p>\n

In this I see the same arrogance that is the bane of Catholics \u2013 everybody likes having the high ground, the claim to the position of certain salvation from which they can \u201cteach\u201d others. Accept Christ, that\u2019s the only thing you need, that\u2019s the only thing that\u2019s important.<\/p>\n

How did that work out for Ravi Zacharias and hundreds like him?<\/p>\n

A person who is so spiritually empty that he behaves literally like the stereotypical alpha-male ape that coerces females into having sex with him by invoking his exalted position in his tribe, is not saved by any definition of the term. That is as base and animalistic and devoid of holiness that is of God, as you can possibly imagine. He was a charismatic male specimen of human animal, he behaved in a bestial manner, lacked not only holiness but also any kind of gentlemanly refinement and self-restraint that would indicate normal human sophistication. If he \u201chad Christ\u201d or \u201cwas saved\u201d, then I need neither, and may God keep me safe from those horrors.<\/p>\n

God only knows that I have to wrestle with the human animal on a daily basis. It degrades my spiritual connection when it\u2019s sick, it wants to eat too much food automatically when I\u2019m focused on something else, the dullness of the physical brain blocks my insight, it colors my emotions and spiritual states with its own instincts, it automatically tries to project fulfillment into all kinds of material things, and I constantly have to check myself to see whether something originates from higher spiritual sources or the \u201crightness\u201d instincts originating from the ape-body. To think I\u2019m in the clear while I still share this animal\u2019s existence would be foolhardy, and it is that very same foolhardiness that I perceive in the Christians, and I must admit I find them annoying. Even St. Paul wouldn\u2019t dare say he\u2019s \u201csaved\u201d before the \u201cend of the race\u201d, and you don\u2019t have that problem? Really? It is one thing to say that God extended his hand towards you, that you recognized and accepted this hand, and that it is that very hand of God that is your salvation, and not any virtue or power of your own, and I would have no issues with that, seeing it as merely a different formulation of my own position. However, it is quite obviously possible for quite a significant number of Christians to use the claim of salvation as an instrument of their own power over others, which they use to satisfy their own chimpanzee instincts and desires. Obviously, there\u2019s more to salvation than accepting Christ as a savior and belonging to \u201cthe\u201d Church. You need to actually keep the faith, remain loyal, every moment of your existence, and the pride of salvation is, to me, just a symptom of spiritual apostasy, of fall into animalistic darkness, where \u201chaving Christ\u201d becomes a currency of social posturing. This is something to be aware of, because these things don\u2019t just exist in the community of leftists, atheists and others; you don\u2019t just suddenly cease to have these kinds of problems just because you managed to sniff some spiritual substance and decided that\u2019s what you want and need. The entirety of your animal problem is still there and you will have to keep it within the grip of the \u201cstructural integrity field\u201d of your spirit until it dies and allows you to leave, and failure to keep a vertical spiritual presence as a dominant force that incarnates in your body will result in the animal part gradually taking parts of control away from the spirit, and it will do its thing.<\/p>\n

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There has recently been major fallout in the Christian circles regarding the Ravi Zacharias scandal, revealed after his death last year. For those who don\u2019t know, Ravi Zacharias is one of those American evangelists; you know the kind: saved by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2238"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2241,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions\/2241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}