Let The Cards Lie: A Biblical Memoir

By Mike Tovar

Mike Tovar's second and he says, final book presents his website essay exposing biblical errors underlying Christian fundamentalist fanaticism. Scores of readable stories like his mom chasing down an airliner or Mike trying his hand at hunting backwards mix lots of pleasure with the business.

As a new parent, Mike had questions about spanking or smacking or hitting with a stick. Discoveries online of manipulated bible translations were eye openers. Wanting to contribute to world peace, Mike started a mailing list to share what he'd learned about children's rights and teen guidance.

A fun loving person but getting the work done, author Mike Tovar mixes both well. A campfire's array of stories under the starry canopy of one book is Mike's to show and tell. Mike says children's lives matter as much as adults. Teen stories are included to demonstrate what Mike perceives as the innate nobility of youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1900
• ISBN: 9798350926255

Book preview

PREFACE

Hello; this website exists solely to satisfy both initial curiosity and a desire for further information about my published booklet WE SPANKED GOD, Biblical Thoughts, Mike Tovar. You are welcome to it; and as I tell myself when I see ‘Welcome’ signs in front of churches I really think, I’ll let you know if I feel welcome once I get in there; thank you. I want you to do the same here.

N.B.—’big news, someone just did the research on the expression ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. Its origin is a 17th-century s+m / erotic ‘love’ poem.

No matter whether you have read none or all of the 70-some pages of my booklet’s one-liners, feel free to listen in here on the ‘q’s + a’s’ printed farther along. Up-front with you here, the title of this essay necessarily is:

An Expose’ Of Error Underlying Christian Fundamentalist Fanaticism

INTRODUCTION

I will show you especially how it never entered God’s biblical mind to tell us to spank one of his little ones. The so-called ‘rod’ rule was for rebellious young men, never young women and children. And the rod was used once-and-for-all on Jesus Christ. The Spirit of Christ now maturely advises ‘Urge the young men to control themselves."

‘When push comes to shove, try pulling, per the little sign on the door’. I thought that liner up after struggling with the entry door of my local newspaper. Check out the article about my booklet that the Lewistown Sentinel kindly wrote on Dec. 31st.

Fallen man is violent, not God. Look at Jesus chasing the merchants out of his heavenly dad’s temple-house. Of those selling doves, he merely told them to pick the cages up and get them out of there. Jesus Christ was frequently assertive, but he was never aggressive. In other words, he never hit anybody. So why are we spanking?

Regular archaeology is correct to show us how both local-Canaanite and Egyptian-influenced Israelite upbringing was violent. God told Moses and Joshua that he’ll send hornets to vacate the villages of the people of the land to avoid violence. If you know, hornets are enormous stinging bees the size of large grasshoppers.

There is much studied evidence to prove Moses and Joshua exaggerated a lot when they wrote the biblical reports of their aggressive exploits.

The people already living in the land, like the Israelite rabble, were morally corrupt with no sense left of social freedom and individual respect, you know no golden rule. And God clearly told the Israelites that it was no quality of character on their part that entitled them in any way to possession of the Land of Canaan.

Remember how the Israelite people had already debauched themselves while Moses was up on the mountain of Sinai. And God then told Moses to stand aside so he could wipe them out. God had told Moses he’ll start everything over with him, but Mo successfully begged him off the idea.

God soon informed the Israelites with whom he had resumed working that if they persisted in their lack of appreciation, then he would drive them out of the land also. He did that very thing using Nebuchadnezzar to exile them to Babylon to recoup seventy years of missed sabbaths, then later by the Romans worldwide until recently.

Moses messed up too, having already disobeyed God one time too many and thus forfeited his own opportunity to enter the promised land with everyone else. And you do know, the entire generation that came out of Egypt, God let them die off in the desert for their own unloving and disrespectful attitude.

I do explain in this essay that many Jewish people have been learning the way of peace, a social story most of Christendom would do well to heed, including the so-called ‘peace churches’.

Moses did correctly pass on the fact from God to the people that God was pointing them all to someone totally better than Moses. God humbly reserved the crucial detail from Moses until later prophetic writers that, that totally better person was going to be an incarnation of himself, Emmanuel meaning ‘God with us’.

This is the same personal God who used to check in on his creations, Adam and Eve once a day in the Garden of Eden to see how much fun they were having there. It was a respectful relationship as I’ll explain further later on.

God as Jesus Christ then stood in the woodshed for the licking all self-conscious people, not brand-new children have evidently earned for themselves. Jesus as God incarnate gave absolutely no indication when he was living here, that children before the age of reason transgress as sin.

Even the prophet Isaiah wrote ahead of time of the Christ Child, Butter and honey will he eat before he is able to discern between the good and the evil. Of course by age 12 Jesus was very focused.

And Jesus was the seed of Eve that God told Satan would bruise his head, totally.

In the meantime for example the original picture-writing of the Chinese peoples is replete, positively full of direct graphic recall of the events of the Garden of Eden (later the brilliant full-spectrum encyclopedia carried by the Chinese commercial fleet and given to merchants of Venice, Italy—the ancient New York City of Europe—would be the foundation of the western cultural renaissance. Note, the practical Arabians had a canal east-west connecting the Nile River with the Red Sea; see the recommended book ‘1434’ for the full story).

So what-to-do? All we have to do is be ‘Nice or nasty, kind or cruel, wise man or fool’, simply looking to God the creator of beauty on the earth and in the cosmos, loving him and each other as a way of life, really the way of life. For ‘the golden rule is the real rod of correction’. But, it’s God’s niceness and kindness and wisdom he fruits in us upon our act of repentance, not any spiritual fruit of our own. Jesus called this being born again.

Understand, apostle Paul twice in the new covenant or new testament, same thing personally articulated the difference between the old system of general coercion and the new one of individual persuasion (which God has always prioritized if people’s wills are conducive to it.) Now watch as God goes with the flow of a positive accumulation of honest individual response to him over the years, slightly crystallized by Jesus.

The two instances are for all of our dumb-brain-joggling benefits. To the Corinthians, in whose community among other hootenanny shenanigans Paul had justly suggested an ostracization of one of the men who was in the dubious habit of fucking his mother, if it was his mother-in-law, fucking/fornicating, the informal/formal words for it. Paul then stands back with a bird’s-eye view and challenges them with the question, What will ye, shall I come unto you with a rod or with a spirit of love and a spirit of meekness?

The other instance is something he said to the Jewish-Christians, in which Paul compares the rod whoopings they received as young men from their ticked-off dads to the new idea of seeking peace with all men, including cantankerous young men. While Paul is wonderfully wordy in the entire letter to ‘the Hebrews’, his meaning here in chapter twelve is clear. Now, no discipline for the present seems to be joyous but rather miserable. ‘See? Divine chastening is circumstantial for everyone now by God’s hand in Jesus.

In a nutshell, the ecclesiastical bully pulpit of Christendom, both corporately and individually is significantly based on the wrongly translated Mosaic ruling of a rod of corporal punishment for rebellious and disrespectful young men. Otherwise what’s the value of innocence?

And further, this slyly connects to the also wrongly translated phrase in the new testament of ‘obey them’, instead of the correct translation from the Greek ‘be ye persuaded’ of your loving and more experienced older sisters and brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do you see the difference ?

My dear readers, we who are truly Jesus’ little ones of his for-ever-love have evidently accepted candy from strangers. ‘Poisoned candy where hand holding metastasizes into arm twisting. A couple, professional statue makers back in communist Russia, got to asking each other about the amazingness of the human hand, especially the thumb. They said privately with each other despite their secular upbringing, that because of the existence of the thumb a wise spirit creator must exist. They soon learned of ‘Christ Jesus’ to put thumb and pointing finger together.

God’s social guidelines, the ten commandments are totally non-violent. God had no logical choice but to put down the rabid animal that were some, not all of the Canaanites. Rabies is a non-negotiable disease, hornets notwithstanding. Put yourself in God’s shoes for a moment.

Cain kills his little brother and donates his own cold-blooded attitude to his children. Who violently dominate the world they make, and so God drowns all but eight decent people. Of these the bad attitude still gets passed on until the first Babylon. Who again stop worshiping the creator and start worshiping the creation.

The people of the post-flood world cluster themselves up at Babylon. God must intervene to get them going in his intended direction. He confuses their single language into the seventy original groupings that modern ethnology and linguistics are aware of.

Next, Israel’s intended exercise is to share with the rest of the world what the almighty god had shown them of his real personality. The refugee years in Egypt as strangers, and before that the pioneer years of Abram and Sarai were supposed to furnish a humble perspective. This is the reason God told them to eat the passover meal once a year standing up.

God later had someone write, To the law and to the testimony. This tells us to look both back to the 10 commandments and forward to the testimony of Jesus. Lastly, an angel told the apostle John …for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

Life is one fun game of Clue, and life is God, who is spirit and in truth has created will-filled matter to reflect himself. And if matter reflects himself, then it only gets better. Therein is our hope of Godly glory made possible by Jesus beating sin and death. Which started in Eden, not some evolution.

Yes there’s conflict, starting with Lucifer, once God’s finest angel. His job was to lead the nurturing of the human race, including praise in song and instrument, his very body having musical appendages. He got greedy, was cast down to Earth, and renamed Satan. Now imagine our subsequent challenge. Even the archangel Michael, when Satan tried to prevent him hiding or whatever the dead body of Moses carefully said, The Lord rebuke you.

Have you heard of Scarface? He is an ancient spirit living in the Big Horn mountains, especially on Cloud Peak. The old story of the First People says he used to live in Heaven and was beautiful. Until iniquity was found in him and God sent him to Earth. Note, it is a respectful tradition and maybe wise to only make day trips up there.

Things often require a closer look. For example, it was not the Egyptian Sinai where the Israelites providentially escaped from the Egyptians. Moses made a bee-line in the great escape across the big Sinai peninsula to the Gulf of Aqaba. They followed a major wadi or canyon drainage system. Which ends in an enormous sand spit on the west shore of the right rabbit-ear of the Red Sea about halfway up it.

Solomon later placed two pillars there, one on each side, the western one with his name visibly inscribed on it. The pillar on the Arabian side was still in the water and then got tooken. Apostle Paul mentioned ‘Sinai in Arabia’ to the Galatians in a letter. Hebrew inscriptions in stone have been found around the entire Arabian peninsula, especially the perimeter. This includes flat stones with engraved pictures of sandals, untied sandals commemorating Moses and the bush on fire that was not consumed.

Another example of a closer look, the Mosaic-Levitical rulings of aggressivity and prejudice were not God’s ideas. Rather, they were like what Jesus pointed out to his disciples about the Mosaic divorce laws. He said they were written into the Levitical rulings by Moses due to the hardness of the selfishly demanding peoples’ hearts. Jesus told them that in the beginning in Eden before people got selfish, a couple in love had an eternal delight with their first love for each other, one of enduring devotion and companionship.

And like my mom said when she first met my fiance’, Good more grandchildren! Do you know what God’s top priority is? ‘Yup, Godly children, our special subject.

This ends my essay’s introduction.

Thank you for reading so far already.

HOME PAGE

Part A

December , 2022 My dear Earthly neighbor ( You’re one-of-akind ! ), BookBaby of Pennsauken, New Jersey midwifed my only-ever published work, except for one inclusion 17 years ago in a list of reader-contributed ‘thought-gems’ always placed on the back cover of its monthly booklet, the Calvary Messenger.

However, an ice storm set in, as today where I live in Pennsylvania, USA , Earth. You know, of my jokingly including Earth, this really is very seriously and pathetically cried out by God Almighty once in his bible-book, Oh Earth ! Earth ! Jesus did exactly like this to Jerusalem.

What significantly happened, since the above-mentioned start in 2005 when watching a well driller and I said to myself, Living water is not drawn from a wishing well, I happily and in relaxed fashion continued to occasionally jot down more of the same one-line statements as expressions and truisms, all biblically based.

Then our only surviving child was eighteen-months and in hindsight I reacted to, or acted upon what I call false programming, yes false teaching. What I did was, after a wonderful ‘one’ year and into a tremendous ‘two’ with this child-person I had I think been entrusted with, I awkwardly figured it was the official time to strike the sweetheart.

Come some next communication situation, yes without warning as a vocalized explanation, I swatted a non-existent fly on his diapered rear with a fly-swatter. The big little guy looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Probably the confused look on my face startled him also into crying.

You see, I had been asking around in the society I communed with. Found was the conflicting, dual opinion of ‘using’ stick or hand. Knowing biblically that the devil is the inspiring author of confusion, I deduced the fact I am asking the wrong people.

So I went into town—I’m out in the country—to Mifflin County’s Children & Youth Services. That began to solve the problem when Nancy, a middle-aged caseworker invited me to sit and talk with her in the family room.

Nancy focused quickly and when I caught my breath and stopped babbling, she said No implements are allowed to be used; that’s federal law. You may use your hand, but are not to hit so hard you leave a red-mark. Then Nancy stood us up right there and held my gaze to say, Take the log out of your own eye. This gal had obviously not only seen senseless tragedy, but also she ‘knew her bible’.

Now hang on to your hats and headship coverings, for God I think seconded that WWJD-implied logic by Nancy with a website that my spouse found on-line. Which reveals the fact of embarrassing simplicity that King James-and-editors wrongly put the one-size-fits-all term ‘child’ alongside the correct Hebrew word for young-adult son, not daughter.

That Hebrew word, ‘na’ar’ is the only conceptual term for any age of so-called ‘child’ from newborns to female and male almost-newlyweds in the entire text of God’s biblical book of The Proverbs. The Hebrew language has some ten specific words for the concept of child and ‘na’ar or male young-adult is the only one God contextually utilized in all of Proverbs. We’ve swallowed this hook, line, sinker, and rod, to the disrespect of fish.

Furthermore, the rod-related passages in Proverbs were each and all mistranslated as biblically forbidden private interpretation by King James. Solomon was merely elaborating on the old and subjective Levitical ruling through Moses for knocking some sense into rebellious young-men on their upper-back muscles, not their buttocks.

A thirty-three-year-old and quotidian innocent Son of God condemned violence with his own body. And the reported words of the Roman captain in charge of the crucifixion tell it fully in light of the apparent cosmic eclipse and earthquake plus Jesus’ telling words. Surely, this man was a son of the gods, he said relatively in his cultural awareness.

Therefore and in other words it never entered God’s mind, so to speak to suggest we in-any-way inflict physical aggression upon what Jesus as God described as these little ones. It was a Mosaic ruling for rebellious young men, not children or maidens. And Jesus put the controversy to rest and then raised himself up again victoriously.

After we all vicariously butchered and skewered God as The Son ( come unto his own, and his own received him not ), his Holy Spirit progressively inspired a new guideline appealing to everyone’s free will saying simply yet profoundly, Urge the young men to control themselves. Do you see the difference? The difference is progressive; and the progress is peace.

Your hat, or headship-covering just flew off again by the wind of God’s Spirit. To say, these botched ‘rod’ passages in which social power-tripping and bullying is established first with God’s little ones is then connected with one other enormous mistranslation as private interpretation by King James and crew connecting the cruel and un-Godly-violent subjugation of children with that of what, our pet dogs? No; ‘adults!

What KJ-and-Krew did next, surely consciously considering their scholarship, was to morph the beautiful lines in the new covenant Greek in Hebrews 13:7 & 17. Which is supposed to say, Be ye (correct KJV grammar, plural) each persuaded of your conscientious and more experienced elders both female and male, who must give an account to God for the nurturing of your younger souls etcetera.

That was wrongly translated by King James to read ‘obey them’, an action non-existent in the church body of Christ Jesus, only mutual persuasion. Any obedience in the Christian church gets done to Jesus, period. Obedience does get commanded by God for children to Godly parents, and conditionally wives to truly Christ-like husbands. The latter is situational not absolute ethics. God in no way means obeying an unGodly husband. The apostle Paul clearly elaborates on this in his writings.

And God isn’t kidding when he says let no one put asunder what he’s romantically put together, yes including our involvement. For sure, our attitude determines our altitude, especially in God’s eyes, fearing him not man. And that Greek word for obedience is also what the wind and the waves did on Lake Galilee that day, God having rocked his only begotten child to sleep for a power-nap on a storm-tossed pillow.

And about this famous fear of God as the Proverbial beginning of wisdom, God precedes that with Psalm 55; 19, b, Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God. Hold on to your horse along with your hat, for those words clearly say the personal demonstration of a willingness to be changed by God precedes as a prerequisite any famous fear we wisely have of him. Herein dear reader is the basis of the sanctified holiness without which no human will see God in his holiness.

The above is the illegal and uninspired foundation for historical ecclesiastical pseudo-Christian power-mongering protocol… in case you didn’t know or know quite what to think. And before I have to mention something worse, do know the KJV as a whole is a sanctified blessing and linguistic marvel compared to the less artistic and less scholarly post-KJV translations, for example ‘holy angels’ instead of merely ‘angels’, or the Lord Jesus not merely ‘the Lord’.

For there are unholy angels and other lords as imposters. Take a look at Gail Riplinger’s work and that of others, as brothers. (Note, a paradigm change may be happening with my bible study. I’m discovering the utility of a straight ‘interlinear’ translation of the Hebrew and the Greek original biblical languages. The best recommendations I’ve heard are for two, Young’s and Rotherham’s; there’re others.)

These examples are among hundreds and hundreds of post-KJV passage translations’ slick maneuvers of rhetorical camouflage. While Gail researched by comparatively collating many bible translations with her photographic mind (and pen and paper, laboriously and in bed for six years with a painful neurological condition), she also discovered biographical facts of the sloppy personal lives as spiritual fruit of numerous individuals involved in post-KJV translations as evident and on the record, starting abominably with the secret lives of Hort and Westcott.

To be fair, the KJV scholars were to the individual of impeccable personal and spiritual credentials. We simply and sadly have to observe that these enormous spiritual strongholds of violence and social control were too much for the KJV translators to deny continuation.

And the correct original word woman was deleted in Genesis by King James and erroneously replaced with the irrelevant word ‘wife’, establishing right there in (the) beginning a humanly instituted policy of disrespect to women and girls.

I for one am changing my attitude and my words. I think I read that fact somewhere in the excellent medieval-to-modern history of Christian women, The Making Of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr, recommended. By the way, related to the above Genesis fact, did you know the Indian Sikhs’ religion began with a determination to reverse the old Hindu humiliation of women and girls?

And long before King James and his editors were publicly infatuated with their ecclesiastical bullybuttons, the recently dead apostles weren’t smelling in their graves if they made it that far when Christian so-called ‘Judaizers’ for want of a better word wrongly changed the original and correct apostolic ecclesiastical procedure of plural leadership, with Jesus as the singular high-priest leader in The Spirit to the, for want of a worse word, resurrected Mosaic procedure of high-priest singular leadership in the flesh. In summary, most of two millennia of Christian leadership simultaneously imitate Jews and murder them. ‘Crazy? ‘Probably not the word for it.

Part B

The above is my own experiential discovery the hard way that so much of Christian church body social dysfunction is directly due to wrong singular leadership in the congregation instead of the biblically correct plural leadership with Jesus as the real ‘senior pastor’. Yes I understand and agree, singular leadership or headship is divinely normal for institutions on the Earth as with job bosses, kings, queens, and ‘kahunas’.

The essential factor here is the degree of social accountability and availability we have one to another. I started to learn this hard lesson wondering why people in the church-group I’d joined wouldn’t talk about issues. By issues I mean double standardized questions. This is a question of contradictory double singular leadership, on a ship’s bridge or airplane cockpit. Jesus wants to singularly lead everyone simultaneously in The Spirit. It’s a foretaste of heaven, downright romantic and integral to life itself.

Included here is Christian marriage as a microcosm of Jesus’ betrothed relationship with his bridal church. Where the man and woman reflect in the here-and-now what is prophesied in The Revelation given to John. There is shown ahead-of-time the Spirit (of Christ)