Exerpts from The Epistle of Barnabus and The Shepherd of Hermas

     

When I was in prison, I needed something to keep me going.  While some of the Bible was useful, I found that some of the books outside of the Bible were more instructive.  The Epistle of Barnabus is just one important example.  I had taken these words and I actually typed them and put them in my pocket.  I would pull them out to review them when I felt I needed to refresh my mind.  
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There are two ways of teaching and power; the one of light and the other of darkness, and there is a great difference between the two ways.  For on the one are stationed the light giving angels of God, on the other are the angels of Satan.  And the one is the Lord from all eternity and unto all eternity, whereas the other is the Lord of iniquity that now is.  This then is the way of light, if anyone desiring to travel on the way to his appointed place would be zealous in his works.  The knowledge then which is given to us whereby we may walk therein as follows:
Thou shalt love him that made thee,
Thou shalt fear him that created thee,
Thou shalt glorify him that redeemed thee from death,
Thou shalt be simple in heart and rich in spirit,
Thou shalt not cleave to those who walk in the way of death,
Thou shalt hate everything that is not pleasing to God,
Thou shalt hate all hypocrisy,
Thou shalt never forsake the commandments of the Lord,

Thou shalt not exalt thyself, but shat be lowly in all things,
Thou shalt not assume glory to thyself,
Thou shalt not entertain a wicked design against thy neighbor,
Thou shalt not admit boldness into thy soul.

Thou shalt not commit fornication, Thou shalt not commit adultery,
Thou shalt not corrupt boys.
The word of God shall not come forth from thee where any are unclean.
Thou shalt not make a difference in a person to reprove him for a transgression.
Thou shalt be meek, Thou shalt be quiet, Thou shalt be fearing the words which thou has heard,
Thou shalt not bear a grudge against thy brother.
Thou shalt not doubt whether a thing shall be or not be.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.
Thou shalt love they neighbor more than thine own soul.
Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion, nor again kill it before it is born.
Thou shalt not withhold thy hand from thy son or daughter, but from their youth thou shalt teach them the fear of God.
Thou shalt not be found coveting thy neighbor's goods;
Thou shalt not be found greedy of gain.
Neither shalt thou cleave with thy soul to the lofty, but thou shalt walk with the humble and the righteous.
The accidents that befall thee thou shalt receive as good, knowing that nothing is done without God.
Thou shalt not be double-minded nor double-tongued.
Thou shalt be subject to thy masters as to a type of God in shame and fear.
Thou shalt not command in bitterness thy bondservant or thine handmaid who set their hope on the same God, lest haply, they should cease to fear the God who is over both of you; for he came not to call with respect of persons, but to call those whom the Spirit has prepared.
Thou shalt make thy neighbor partake in all things, and shalt not say anything is thine own.  For if ye are fellow partakers in that which is imperishable, how much rather shall ye be in the things which are perishable.
Thou shalt not be hasty with thine own tongue, for the mouth is the snare of death.
So far as thou art able, thou shat be pure for thy soul's sake.
Be not thou found of holding thy hands out to receive, and drawing them in to give.
Thou shalt love as the apple of thine eye everyone that speaketh unto thee the Word of the Lord.
Thou shalt remember the day of judgment night and day, and thou shalt seek out day by day the persons of the saints, either laboring by word and going to exhort them and meditating how thou mayest have souls by thy word, or thou shalt work with thy hands as a ransom for thy sins.
Thou shalt not hesitate to give, neither shalt thou murmur when giving, but thou shalt know who is the good paymaster of thy reward.
Thou shalt keep those things which thou has received, neither adding to them nor taking away from them.
Thou shalt utterly hate the Evil One.
Thou shalt judge righteously.
Thou shalt not make a schism, but thou shalt pacify them that contend by bringing them together.
Thou shalt confess thy sins.
Thou shalt not betake thyself to prayer with an evil conscience.  This is the way of light.

The Shepherd of Hermas

I say to him, "Sir, these commandments are great and beautiful and glorious, (and are able to gladden the heart of the (man) who is able to observe them.  But I know not whether these commandments can be kept by a man, for they are very hard."  He answered and said unto me:  "If thou set it before thyself that they can be kept, thou wilt easily keep them, and they will not be hard; but if it once enter into thy heart that they cannot be kept by a man, thou wilt not keep them.  But now I say unto thee; if thou keep them not, but neglect them thou shalt not have salvation, neither thy children nor thy household, since thous hast already pronounced judgment against thyself that these commandments cannot be kept by a man."

My book: The Grace of Repentance: Keeping God's Commandments is available at: http://www.graceofrepentance.com

Richard Michael Simkanin: Dead in Prison 12-28-2010

     I was shocked when I was informed that Richard had passed away.  I was in the middle of answering a letter he had sent to me in November.  We were both a part of the "tax protester" movement and both of us appeared in the USA Today Ad regarding the fraud of the income tax along with three or four other men.  I actually met Dick at a meeting in Arlington Virginia in February of 2001.  Both of us gave speeches regarding the problem with the income tax and that we as "employers" were not required to withhold funds from our workers' paychecks.  Dick went to prison around the end of 2003 if I remember correctly, and I went to prison in May of 2005.
     Dick was one of the nicest men I've ever known.  He had a great sense of duty to the truth and he was always respectful of other peoples' views, even if he disagreed with them.  He also had a great sense of humor.  Both of us trusted the system.  We had faith in a system that we thought were governed by a certain set of laws and moral principles; we were wrong.  In both cases, exculpatory evidence was withheld from the jury to insure our convictions.  In my case, I remember standing in front of a judge showing how the income tax was repealed in 1939, yet when I brought this up I was told that I had to pay my taxes.  So much for the written law.
     One thing Dick said to me in a letter that cut to the heart was the following: "Please don't send anything about mainstream Christianity.  It's been so watered down it's actually reverted back to paganism.  I read your article about "Idiot", it was good and it fits today's Christian."  The reason why it cut to the heart is because I agreed with him.  Having spent time reading the Bible for over 25 years it is my conclusion that what is being passed off as Christianity is nothing more than paganism.  The Christianity part is the "sheep's clothing" on the wolf. ( The article Dick was referring to is: How Did We Become Such Idiots?" which is posted here on this blog, and a .pdf version is posted on http://www.graceofrepentance.com)   Those who call themselves "Christians" don't act like Christians nor do they want to do much to improve their behavior.
     The reason for this is simple.  There are only two ways a man can go:  either it is going to be God's way, which is God's world order, or it is going to be Satan's way, which is the "new world order".  New world order is just another name for Satanism.  What Dick and I didn't understand was that the government and religious systems are essentially the same thing, just the flavor is different.  So we both jumped into the cesspool thinking we could do some good with it, when in fact, all we did was to destroy our families and businesses.  Dick had a $5,000,000 plastic extruding company, and I had a more modest aviation flight bag manufacturing company which grossed over $1,000,000 in its best year.  Between the two of us, we had about 50+ people working at any one time.  Both Dick and I became divorced from our wives over this, and my marriage of 32 years broke under the pressure of the battle with the "government".  I think our problem was that we just couldn't fix stupid; we couldn't fix evil.  Stupid and evil are the essential ingredients of a government that is completely outside of God's laws.  So, nothing good happens when they do anything.  And seeing how it was operating under Bush and now Obama, the end result is stupid and evil.
     I understand that the Feds buried him as no one from his family claimed his body.  The "patriot" movement ran scared and were more trouble than anything else.  It provided a false hope, a false hope of some kind of remedy under a system that is completely on the dark side.  You see, Dick was still in prison because some wing-nut provided to him some papers to file in the court, and as a result, he got another seven years for violating supervised release.  So that makes me think that this could have been done to him on purpose.  Anyone who thinks that the U.S. Constitution is a document of freedom is either naive or just stupid; maybe both.  There is no law other than Smith and Wesson 101.  This country does not have a true body of law that can be used.  I suspect that the reason for that lies with the use of the oath.
     But what I come away with in my relationship as a friend of Richard Simkanin, is that this was a man who I had a lot of respect for and I felt honored that we were both friends.  He had the courage of his convictions and he actually acted upon them.  While I didn't always agree with him, he was a man who believed in getting to the truth.  Eventually, we both were able to come to the same conclusions on many things.  And when he called today's "Christians" pagans, he hit the mark right on the spot.  Richard will be missed by a few of us and will be remembered by a few of us and I was very happy to be able to call him my friend.

Walter Allen Thompson
http://www.graceofrepentance.com

On Reading and Writing

     

     A few months ago, I finished my first book called: The Grace of Repentance: Keeping God's Commandments.  And when I finished the book, I realized just how dangerous putting faith in any writing can be.  And as we see the growth of the Quran and the apparent corruption of the Bible, it started to settle in my head that the scribble only has at best, secondary authority for anything.  The scribble (writing) is only as good as the truth it reflects.  The written law, for instance, is only as good as to the consistency in which it is enforced.  The biggest problem that I see in all of this is that the reader has very limited ability to confirm any writing of history because it is always written by the one who is in power.
     Reading and writing have the power to completely distort a man's mind.  If just one lie or even an unintended misinformation is taken in, it can completely distort a man's thinking from reality.  Since my experience has been with the Bible, I have seen just how easy it is to distort the intent of the writing by simply adjusting the text to fit the agenda of the writer.  And the result is that chaos is put into a man's mind and his thinking becomes so distorted he doesn't know what is right or wrong.  Any action taken by that writing can get him into a lot of trouble.  Because the action that he takes based on false information will usually be one that he doesn't really want for himself.  He does it because it is written down.
     A man is only responsible to fear God and keeping His commandments. And by following the commandments will always end up with a good outcome; disobeying the commandments always has a bad outcome.  If I am told by someone that I don't have to keep the commandments any longer, then I am being misinformed.  And if I act upon that misinformation, I will receive even more trouble.  This I know to be true because I have experienced it.  Every time I have relied upon a writing, at least in a spiritual or political sense, without testing the veracity of it, I have always been the worse off for it.  For instance, if I read: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth", I know that is true because there can be no other reason for the existence of the universe and those living things upon it.  So, I don't need a bible to tell me that God created it because I can see the evidence of the creation itself.  I experience my own existence as I am continually conscious of it.
Conversely, if I study the evidence of the theory of evolution, I can see that it is completely without merit and is about as stupid as anything can get.  However, if a bunch of the brainwashed scientists decide to write evolution down in a scientific journal, many people will look to the writing as an authority in and of itself.
     Here is the problem I see right now.  People tend to give too much authority to something that is scribbled.  Just because it is scribbled doesn't mean that it has any veracity.  The only way a writing can have any authority is if what is written is the truth.  Anything less than that makes the document false, unusable, and completely good for nothing.
     So when considering religious or political ideas the scribble only has authority if it is true or it is true in its practice.  The teaching must always have a high moral standard that complies with the natural order.  Any bible or constitution is of no value if the moral principles they reflect are not honored by those who put themselves in authority.
     I have come to the point to where I don't like to read as much as I used to because I really don't know what kind of material I am learning or whether it is even true.  How can I believe anything that a corrupted religious or political leader writes unless I have another way of verifying the information?
     Any writing must be looked at critically before it is believed or even used.  In my opinion, we all should be much more critical of what we put into our minds so that we do not distort reality and truth.



Walter Allen Thompson has a new book called Natural Law: The True Supreme Law of the Land