how now brownpau
De Quiros on Filipino cults. The PBMA is in good company: they are but a dark mirror reflecting the often nasty foibles of religious sectarianism in our culture.
Speaking of which, I’m suddenly back in the pertinent search results. Maybe the Googlebot was just making tampo.
Disturbing. I’m getting spam on an email address that I had thought was safely javascript protected. This means that unscrupulous mass email marketers have either broken through the encoding, or they’re harvesting addresses manually to add to their insiduous spam lists.
How much spam do you get in a day?
The Leaderboard, a link-ranking of Christian blogs. I’m happy to be in the Top 10 — at the moment — but I’m not quite certain that the results are all perfectly accurate.
I never get tired of playing Sword of the Samurai. Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I fought my way to daimyo of the clan Murakami. And when a rival hatamoto was chosen because he had more troops and land, I assassinated him. There.
Curious. Yesterday, I got amost 200 hits for PBMA and Ruben Ecleo searches, but today there are none; my page is suddenly no longer cached, so even a search for “PBMA Ecleo and Brownpau” turns up only Ganns’ page. I wonder if this blog entry had anything to do with my getting pulled from the Google db for that search? Or did they just notice that a thematically unrelated blog was getting inordinately huge amounts of traffic?
(Ganns, by the way, is a wonderfully vibrant Christian blogger, a fellow PEX moderator, and a friend from way back in college. Go check him out if you have not already done so.)
We may not all agree with other facets of Mark Horne’s theology, but I really love this particular essay:Saul of Tarsus identified Jesus as the God of Israel. Not just “a god,” and not just “almighty small-letter-g god,” but Lord God, as in, “one in being with the Father” God. When Jesus said, “I am,” I don’t doubt for a second that he meant “I am.”
Tim and Raffy now have comments, the former through Sensus Plenior, and the latter through Enetation.
Several new links added, including but not limited to: Gary, Peps, SinglePinay, Reybelde, Nheo, and Yoshi. (Yup, lots of Pexers!)
Those last two links were a bit of a problem: you can’t hyperlink to sites hosted on the Spaceports “cgi-bin” server. Clicking this link, for example, will send you to a 404 page, but copying the link text and pasting it into your browser’s address bar will work fine. The limitation also prevents framing and hotlinking resources hosted on the cgi-bin server, and requires the use of a meta-redirect from a “regular” Spaceports page. Annoying, eh? That’s the reason I left Spaceports back in my free webhosting days.
As painfully evidenced by Ruben Ecleo and the Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association, we can see how popular a strategy it is for cultist leaders to claim to be Jesus reincarnated; not just in rural provinces of the Philippines, but elsewhere in the world as well.
Jesus had words for the generations after his ascension, a future world that could be easily deluded by false Messiahs:
“Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect — if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time. So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the desert,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather.”
Christ is Lord, God come in the flesh for the salvation of all who put their faith in him and him alone. That is a grisly, bloody, yet ultimately glorious mantle that no man can even pretend to take up for his own self-glorification. The Second Coming of Christ at the end of the ages will not be through a reincarnation or rebirth; he ascended bodily, and that is how he will return at the Judgement. Any who claim to be Jesus reborn, no matter their charisma, signs, and wonders, will be proven frauds: vultures gathering at the carcass of false, fleshly doctrine.
But those who through the sacrifice of Jesus have inherited the gift of salvation, who have been cloaked with the righteousness that is by faith, will be raised to a promised resurrection that no mere mortal could ever give — or take. So take careful heed, and make certain the Messiah that you follow is The True One.
(Update: Thank you to all the “Rubenian” cultists who left their angry, rambling, heretical responses. These comments will go a long way around the web to prove the true nature of the PBMA cult to the world.)
Aldam Tilao, aka Abu Sabaya of the Abu Sayaff: shot dead.
Oh, and an asteroid narrowly missed us. Yawn.