Mr. Allen Taylor did something bold. He decided to publish an anthology. If that in and of itself was not enough, he decided to publish stories about Biblical themes without the usual characters. The settings all feature moments of punishment: The Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, and finally the Biblical Flood. These are the settings of expulsion, fire concomitant with brimstone, and water–respectively. Taylor chose to do this because “the stories (concerning the themes) lend themselves to a high degree of speculation.”
Mr. Taylor’s work features within the anthology, and somewhat forebodingly the introductions proclaim that he is simply a publisher and that he received many unexpected submissions but that his job was first and foremost to publish and not to act as a censor. Additional disclaimers are that any heavenly personages that are offended may take up their dispute with the proper authorities. It is a fine line to walk in this increasingly polarized age as no one seems to understand the concept of the ‘Freedom of the Press’. Voltaire wrote in Friends of Voltaire the following: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” It is hard to think of a stronger stance than this concerning the freedom of the press, and one that it appears Mr. Taylor would support.
The Biblical Legends Anthology Series might best be likened to a kind of Rorschach test about the Heavenly Father in the role of YHVH. If so, the submissions sent show, on balance, something about which to be troubled. True, most of these scenes lend themselves to the judgment of an angry God, but that is not the totality of what could be written about here. More than a few pieces seem to enjoy trying to push evil to the edge. Of course, what makes these more lurid descriptions “okay” is that the evil people are going to be killed in a rain of sulfur or be drowned in a pool of unforgiving water. There is more than a smattering of actually creative Science Fiction takes as well. One particularly original piece considered the Garden of Eden and God as a computer process. Another one concerned pieces of dust being named and a kind of sisterhood that had vague overtones of being a possible coven of women who are mad about being created. Still, later pieces feature Solomon trying to rescue something he knows should not be rescued, and still another ribald take narrates a breakdown of the whole affair in contemporary kinds of hipster-speak.
Stranger entries concern disembodied spirits (Maybe they are familiar spirits?) undergoing reincarnation loops and there is no shortage of Sodomites doing well, what Sodomites do. (Hint: It begins and ends in fire) There are pieces here that could easily become books on their own, and there are more than a few folks who are probably as of yet undiscovered talents capable of achieving something in the art and process that wears the title of “author”.
What was missing was the kind of love and respect the Heavenly Father typically represents. There are moments of this present, but more than a few have a defiant tone in the end because many pieces, it seems, are written from the perspective of evil. (Is it just being in character? One wonders.) Toward the end, there is even a tale about a kind of sympathetic ‘this is the VH1 Lucifer behind the scenes’ take where the reader is supposed to understand that Lucifer hates humanity only because they were ‘kinda mean to him’.
The poetry entries are fewer, but that is not surprising since what Mr. Taylor put together was not inherently a poetry anthology. No, instead he took the risk to open the field wide, and what he got might be a better look at where people who submit pieces to anthologies lie on the spectrum of “Deep Daddy issues.” If so, it is little wonder everything has been so dysfunctional in the past ten or so years.
What the Torah and New Testament make clear as the YHVH hates to destroy humanity. He tries every other avenue and has great patience before these consequences are enacted. No piece hinted at this deep sorrow. More than a few treated it like a flippant comedy. Sure, as a writer, one can assume poetic license. However, it is abundantly clear that YHVH is heartbroken by performing these acts even going so far as to repent Himself for having created man before destroying the world using The Flood.
Nobody can control what is submitted to an anthology, but are we, as humanity, really this disconnected from understanding not only the terror of these scenarios but the deep sadness of The One who created us due to these events? Sure, we can make entertaining stories based on that, but should we not also balance this other aspect? It does appear within this anthology, but not as much as one might expect–or perhaps as much as one might hope to expect.
Author’s Note: While writing this there was a Church in New London, Connecticut that was constructed in 1850 that simply fell. If we are a little sad about losing that kind of history, how much more so must the Creator be over losing large portions of His creation? Link
Thanks to Mr. Taylor for providing reviewer copies of his work! Subscribe to him here.[Send Lightning!]
Congressman Troy E. Nehls undertook the seismic effort to publish a book about border security along with US policy and politics. The stuff in these pages is a red-hot issue right now. Nehls has unique insights from his perch within Congress.
Mr. Nehls hits on the unique concept of using a metaphor concerning a time machine between two points in American history–1890 and 2024. Using economic analysis, he shows how the modern era would happily pay people their wages from 1890 as the cost is far less. The people in 1890 would be content, as the wages in 2024 are far greater than those in 1890. Time, inflation, opportunity costs, and myriads of other factors are involved in a typical economic discussion while here these concepts are turned on their head to show the logic of a market that is free from the constraints of time. The logical conclusion to this chain of reasoning is that these time-travelers become hardened to their actual time since they are jumping around so often and are therefore out of tune with the issues in their own respective places. They begin to see themselves as a part of a community of time-traveling economic hitmen in a sense, and not so much as people who live in 2024 or those who live in 1890.
Mr. Nehls uses this analogy to escape from contemporary discussions about the Mexico border where polarising racial narratives make it impossible to logically discuss the issues without some fervent accusation of someone coming from a place of discrimination as opposed to math. This does a great job of removing the pathos from the topic so that one can simply focus factually on how the argument would advance with America compared to itself only at different times.
The book shows us that Mexico has traditionally worked in tandem with Big Agricultural businesses to cause what Nehls terms “pushes and pulls” that are coincidental to harvest times and labor needs. These pushes and pulls left Mexicans poor enough that they could never settle in the US in the 30’s and 40’s, but rich enough to want to come. At the same time, the presence of these Mexican immigrants is enough to drive wages down for those who are American citizens thus allowing agricultural businesses to continue making large sums of cash while keeping wages depressed. A push is defined as a reason to want to leave where one is, whereas a pull is defined as a reason that is an incentive to go somewhere else.
Also indicated here are how the drug cartels use a similar kind of logic to not only ferry drugs across the border, but to traffic human beings for labor, sex, or whatever else it is that cartels desire.
All of these issues, Nehls points out, are historically backed by Democrats since they require a dependent population either through government benefits or quickly expedited citizenship to gain needed votes to stay in office. The tactic, it seems, is to give people just enough incentive to want to come here from places like Latin America, but never enough that they can stand on their own feet and vote in some way the Democratic party might not like.
The cartels (and others) have learned to use the loopholes of laws concerning children coming with their families to the US to create a kind of rent-a-child circular business where kids are brought to the US and then returned to Mexico for big money. The kids have special laws when they are with their families (or assumed families) that make it harder for the people crossing the border to be deported. Cartels use this to their advantage.
Other connections are made between the World Economic Forum, the Davos economic group in Switzerland, and the World Economic Forum who all work together with liberal Democrats who are trying to produce a world without borders or nations in order, one concludes, to begin a kind of New World Order (Reich?) with themselves at the top. Nehls argues that COVID was part of this effort. The other issue that they wish to use is Global Climate Change.
Nehls quotes statistics to prove that crime goes up with more immigration, although one is reminded that there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics” as Twain attributed to Benjamin Disraeli. Even without the statistics, though, it is not hard to comprehend that a country that allows people in from places that have tremendous social problems is going to likely suffer some magnification of those problems as those people become more numerous within a country.
Nehls’s main thesis is that all of these dirty tricks are being used to ultimately destroy the United States as a place that holds Constitutionally derived freedoms and liberties so that a small handful of rich globalists no longer have to worry about America opposing their intrigues. He also is not shy to say that the 2020 election was stolen by these same people using a tactic where large cities are targeted to change voting demographics while allowing the rest of the state to remain more Republican.
To finish the time-traveling analogy, these rich elitists are in a club no one else is in, and their allegiance is to no one other than their bank accounts. They want to eliminate the middle class and create a scenario where there are two classes of people–the very rich and the very poor. Guess which one they wish to remain?
The final chapters of the book deal with all the reforms that Donald Trump implemented, and argue that these policies were effective in patching the dam. Indeed, there are many, many restrictions Trump put into place that many will, no doubt, not be aware of. Discouragingly, most of these policies were removed by the current Biden administration, since, the book argues, they did not win the election, and they are going to need their bag of dirty tricks again for the next election. The book documents each of these policies, and why they were there, and it does show that Trump’s administration was tough on immigration and the border. After all, nothing says border security quite like building a big wall between one country and another. China did this long ago, and the wall still stands today.
A most interesting piece, speaking of China, the book also advances, is that the Fentanyl overdoses and other drug issues in the United States appertain to China getting revenge on the US for the 1800s and the generation of an opioid addiction that both Britain and the US enabled by shipping a lot of poppy that direction. Shipping the Fentanyl to the border into the US is China’s revenge, although the ultimate aim is to restore China to its former 1700s glory by those who lead it. How they intend to do this using communism is beyond the scope of this book, but would make an interesting read on its own.
While many progressive Democrats would not be interested in reading this book as the stance it outlines flies directly in the face of what that platform holds there are enough facts here to make the read worthwhile. There are many, many pieces of the picture delineated that cannot be denied as factual and historical. The statistics are the weakest part since COVID and subsequent events make most statistics suspect at best. (Who is funding them, who did the study, why did they do it, etc.) Of course, when a fact is obvious enough, one requires no statistics. It does not take a genius to see that if you allow the wrong kinds of people into your country for the wrong reasons, your country is going to have serious internal issues. Nehls makes the case it does. Everyone owes it to themselves to see if they agree with him.
Author’s Note: Bombardier Books, the publisher, made a digital review copy available. You can check out their site here: Bombardier Books Thanks!
A book about Zen does not need to say much in order to say more than a person can handle. A book about physics often must say much more, although the essence of the equations and ideas once firmly grasped, should not take long to explain. The Dancing Wu Li Masters tries to do both and ultimately fails at doing each task in certain respects.
In fairness, this book is now old. The first printing was back in 1979. The explanations are repeated in more modern books, so this tells the reader that this one was instrumental in informing future authors on the topic of how best to approach the subject. Zukav does, at times, have a gift for explaining complicated topics with ease. At others, he belabors the narrative and drops in how similar certain facets of Quantum Mechanics are to an acid trip. To be sure, Quantum Mechanics is strange. However, it may be that everyone who studies the field finds themselves on a kind of intellectual acid trip. This is because Quantum Mechanics from a mystical standpoint, has the curious sensation of having your own perceptions stare back at you in a jumbled way. Not too surprisingly, this lends itself to a kind of nihilism that Zukav attempts to marry off to Eastern Taoism through the means of a Tai Chi master who is called Al Huang.
The problem with Al Huang’s Tai Chi way is that it all seems relative to man as opposed to being relative to the way itself. Indeed, one of the steps in the indicated mystical system is a way called “My Way”, which, a cursory reading in any Buddhist text will tell you should not last much beyond the first hour of day one in any serious Buddhist pursuit of enlightenment. There is only “The Way” which is a critical difference that this text equivocates. This, as will be seen, proves dangerous.
The cover art is reminiscent of the Isle of Man’s many-footed flag emblem called the “Triskeles”. After reading through the entirety of the book, one wonders if the objective was not simply to devise a way to worship man and his cleverness. Indeed, there is a lot of cleverness in the book. The central favored explanation, for instance, Quantum Mechanics centers on the Copenhagen interpretation which suggests one must be preset if a tree should fall in the woods or else nothing at all might happen. This is the purely statistical understanding of QM, however. Bohm and others put forth theories that do not make guest appearances here. One of these is called the “Pilot Wave” theory. These are not widely adopted, but they can explain many facets of Quantum theory just as well if not better than the Copenhagen one. Now, there are even some physical models in a Bohm-style that show how the double slit experiment might work without having to rely on many assumptions the Copenhagen interpretation requires.
The Buddhism/Taoism/Tai Chi failure is in the idea that all matter is ultimately empty and is simply dancing. Standard Buddhism suggests one should empty one’s mind of all forms–and this part is the critical part–of all things OTHER THAN those things which exist in the Buddha mind. This is a key distinction and many Buddhist texts discuss aspects of various wrathful and peaceful deities and a kind of Buddhist apocalypse to come. Far from suggesting these are “empty dances” one rather instead gets the impression that if one does not have the Buddha-mind at this point, one will burn up with the rest of creation. There is a definitive aim that this book misunderstands or misapplies. Yes, physical things change their form, but the forms they assume, as Plato indicated, mean something, somewhere. Enlightenment is the road to understanding, hopefully, what that means. It is not, “Oh well, things come and go, kids!”
By the time the reader gets to the part of imaginary particles the entire work starts to feel like an imaginary intellectual ivory tower. While it is true virtual particles exist in theory, there is something distinctly cynical about assuming they exist for the purpose of theory while suggesting everything is an illusion. By the time one is done reading the book, one feels as though one would have done better to have read nothing at all. It is only salvageable as an experience by disagreeing with the core tenets the book presents that anything of value can be derived. This might be called “The Way of Annihilation of Falsehoods”. It is peculiar since this is the only book that this strategy must be employed without a doubt to derive the benefit of meaning.
It could be that Zukav did not understand the Tai Chi fellow. It could be the Tai Chi fellow did not understand Zukav. It might even possibly be that the understanding of the field was, at the point this book was made, immature. However, one feels even with all that Zukav would still have tried to place man squarely in the middle of the universe like some kind of God regardless. While the entirety of QM screams “Get over yourselves, there’s too much going on here” Zukav seems to yell back, “I know better because it’s all an illusion because of this Tai Chi guy over here!” Never mind that it is misapplied. Never mind the entire discussions on symbols and mathematics not necessarily corresponding to models. (What are models if they cannot be discussed?) Never mind other overlapping Eastern philosophy that suggests that these theories are only being half-applied. The point to be made–the book is bad. It is bad the same way a lot of old kung fu movies are bad. One cannot exactly follow the plot, but one feels like one should finish the movie since they are “this far in”. It is bad because it fails to yoke together its intended subject domains. It is bad because it picks and chooses the points that prove its case, but ignores things that flatly contradict it. It is ultimately bad because it offers a teaching that is patently false as far as the mysticism it claims to represent goes.
For all that, there are some diamonds in here, but the reader’s hands have to get far too bloody in the digging for them. It is better to pass on this one and find something else from an actual wisdom teacher.
