The verses regarding Saul are posted here, and while searching for a medium, he eventually finds that while he was searching for said medium he was already in trouble for not, lets say, taking care of, scratch that, dealing with, nay, terminating the Amalekites: the business of a king uniting and creating his kingdom. For that, the job of creating this kingdom is passed to David.

I like this comment from #21, “if you kill 185 Hamas, you end their ability to continue [conduct, really] a[ny kind of] “cycle of violence” (snear quotes intended)”, i.e. resurgence of hostilities. Roger that.

So might I infer that there is consensus here regarding hope that hamas was stuffed into those buildings in large numbers?

So what then, when our lethal enemies use our own democratic institutions and its (relatively) newfound pop tenets, such as concepts of the world divided into mostly innocent civilians and some sort of military industrial complex, against us. Whereas for our enemies no such distinction exists for them. Be it takfiri with sword, an assault rifle, or mass-killing belt, or the person baking the bed they eat, takfiri don’t believe in anyone (us included) as being “innocent” or “civilian”, but they know that members of the presscorps do. And they count on it: for useful idiots on the left do much heavy lifting for them.

I’m not saying that a kingdom or monarchy is a better means to victory against the enemies of humanity than our democratic form of government (yet), but for Saul, David, (and Agamemnon), failure to do what was required to accomplish that -eliminating the philistines and hence founding the kingdom- had devastating results.

David may not have eliminated every last philistine, but he smacked them down hard enough to eliminate them as a threat and founded a kingdom to be reckoned with, that lasted more than a few centuries.

Jesus, so sayeth the dead sea scrolls, belonged to the Essenes sect. An apocolyptic sect that spoke of an afterlife and a day of judgement. So the story of Lazarus has been interpreted as story of an essene who had fallen away from the tenets of this theology and was, according to their view, either “dead” or perhaps asleep.

So this reflects back on Saul, who had become dormant in the pursuit of the kingdom, and sought out a medium to travel for him. He gets the answer he was looking for, but not the one he wanted. And the calling to found the kingdom passed to David.

Accounts of what happens in a NDE, and how it changes the principal involved, go to the idea of “remembering oneself”. That is, knowing yourself apart from the politically correct pieties and superficial distrations of the here and now, just long enough to re-establish who you really are, and, what is your destiny.

This applies to individuals and nations alike.

http://www.loc.gov/vets//kit.html

Is it?
Well she made a hamburger of it, then.

That is Mary Baker Eddy’s point.

I have another one lined up, a guy who flew A-20’s, got shot down, and ended up fighting alongside Filipino guerillas until liberated by MacArthur’s troops.

They are out there, folks, but not much longer, and we have to find them. We can all be Stephen Ambrose to some band of brothers, somewhere.

The Troubled Soul: God’s Word and Our Feelings

A meditation on psalm 42

People are stuck in one of two beliefs:
1. Dualistic concept of separatedness of body and mind (or soul).
2. Materialistic concept that the mind is a product (or excrement, take your pick) of the spongy mass called brain.

It may be
3. The body and mind are not dualistic, but the mind is a primary factor and the body is its projection and a tool for functioning in constraints of the 3d spacetime. The soul can be conceptualized as an overmind–a composite of projections in various spacetimes.

“Did you feel like you were ‘dead’?” asks the interviewer.

“Oh yes, I was quite dead. Quite dead. No doubt of that. Sort of like, you know, in the westerns, when the sheriff will walk up and kick the guy, and say, ‘yup, he’s dead all right’.”

A lot of people think the mind and the brain are not the same, that the latter doesn’t create the former. William James talked about this perspective.

“Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century” Edward Kelly, Emily Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso and Bruce Greyson

“The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul” Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary

are two recent offering along this line of thought.

Sometimes people bundle telekinesis into the sixth sense, but in my view it has not much to do with it, it is a different cup of coffee altogether and I don’t know much about it, except that it seems to involve manipulation of the temperature and redirection of energy gained by that process. At least research seems to suggest that.

There was an amusing story I’ve read a while ago that documents the use of the sixth sense in a mountainous region somewhere in SE Asia (I forgotten the geographic location).

An anthropologist visited a village in the region that was about three days walk from then nearest town, There were no roads due to the terrain. After being there for a few days, collecting his material, he noticed that the locals stood often under a tree in the center of the village, as if in contemplation.

One day, the male of the couple he had accomodation with went in early morning to the town 3 days away to buy some item on the market. That day afternoon he found the wife of that man under the tree. He waited until she was done with whatever she was doing and asked her about it. She said that she forgotten to tell her husband, before he departed, to buy a specific type of shawl and few other items for kitchen. He thought that he misheard, because the reply did not make any sense whatsoever, but he did not want to pry.

In 6 days, the husband was back and the anthropologist was present when he pulled the purchased items from his bag. And there it was, amongst other things the shawl and utensils. The anthropologist was flabbergasted, as the reply he got 6 days ago suddenly seemed making sense, yet he was missing something important. So he asked for an explanation.

The lady of the house replied: “We use that tree to concentrate. We send our thoughts to our partners, if we forgot something or to ask about their well being. We would love to use a telephone, but we don’t have any here”.