Venting My Spleen, Biblically

This past weekend I experienced a dilemma that I consider to be an intolerable invasion of my editorial rights concerning this Blog. From the beginning of my writing, back in December of 2008, when I began to write the predecessor to this present Blog (called "The End-Times News Review", which is generally listed on the same Google page as this one but a few listings below it), I determined to keep this as my Personal Opinion Blog. I am not an expert in Biblical Eschatology ( the study of Prophecy), I am not the Pastor of a church, I don't even have a degree from a Bible college. Therefor, technically speaking, I have no credibility to even express the opinions that I do, if I am trying to convince my readers of my ultimate authoritative correctness. And so I endeavor not to do so, as I don't wish this Blog to be so much about my personality as it is about the issues I discuss. As the heading suggests, I am depending upon the basic Biblical knowledge of the readers to easily discern my correctness, or not, and to agree or disagree with me as they choose. It is not as important to me to convince the skeptic as it is to simply point out to the believers who read my Blog the various news items that may, or may not serve as minor, or partial revelations from God that He is gradually setting up the conditions in the world today that are necessary for His Prophecies to eventually come to pass. As far as the skeptics are concerned, I'll leave them up to the Holy Spirit to provoke them to jealousy of the faith that I, and presumably the majority of my readers have in the inevitability of all of God's prophecies eventually being fulfilled. I certainly do hope that my reasoning might have some small part in leading the skeptics to faith in Jesus Christ, as their Lord and Savior, but that is not the main purpose of my Blog. There are probably millions of Pastors, and Evangelists out there that can do a much better job of it than I can, so I have determined not to overtly try to do that which I am not qualified to do. But I am concerned that our busy lifestyles might cause some sincere, devout Christians to simply miss some news item that seems of minimal interest to the non-believers, but under careful Biblical examination might reveal some gem of information pointing to the eventual fulfillment of some End-Times prophecy. If this also tends to provoke the Biblical curiosity of the former skeptic, so be it, and praise the Lord! It'll be to His Glory, and not mine!

On the other hand, as this is somewhat a "labor of love" for me, and it is almost an exclusive expression of my personal opinions ( excepting the Bible quotes, which are almost the same thing), I take offense when someone tries to latch onto my expressed opinion in order to promote a lie which I have not, and would not ever endorse. Such was the case this past weekend, and my blood is still boiling over the subtle audacity that obviously was entailed.

As I've said since I am not a qualified, or ordained preacher, I would never consider trying to set up a non-profit ministry in order to raise the funds necessary to live on, in order to make this my full-time occupation, which it is almost anyway ( even without any Funding). First of all I couldn't find any respectable Board members, to serve as my Biblical, business and financial guides, as they couldn't reasonably trust me to not write anything that would reflect badly on their own reputations ( as implicit endorsers of my unqualified preaching, and I'm not about to spend the necessary time to get a degree from a seminary or Bible college so I can get ordained, in order to write the opinions that I already am). That said, I have grown fond of being able to put food on the table, and being able to sleep under a roof at night. So, I have been trying to establish an advertising arrangement with Google Adsense in which they would pay me small fees to run inoffensive ads on my Blog. Frequent readers should already have seen many of the ads that have been running for the last couple of months. Unfortunately, I have been unable to receive any payment as my considerable computer illiteracy has kept me from being able to connect my Adsense "Ad Code" to the proper spot on my Blog, which requires a familiarity with the HTML computer language. This final step in the process has eluded me, in spite of my dogged efforts. Meanwhile Google has been running ads on my Blog, technically without my permission, since the payment procedure is incomplete. I haven't minded, as I considered this to be a temporary situation, though it has dragged on to infuriating lengths. My main concern was that I reserved the right to edit the choice of ads that were shown on my Blog. This was the case when I found ads that I considered to be inappropriate; they always had an "x" in the corner that I could "click" to remove. That is until this past weekend!

To my outrage I discovered an ad was being run on my Blog that said, "Mormons believe in Jesus as Savior". I acknowledge that this may be true with some Mormons, but then by definition they could not truthfully call themselves "Mormons" any more. The most central doctrine of the Mormon faith, as I understand it is that they consider the "Book Of Mormon" to be the most accurate revelation of God's word, supplanting even the Bible in authority whenever there is a contradiction in the stated principles of each, which are considerable, and frequent. This is an inexcusable contradiction in the authority of the Bible for any true Christian believer, and there is no denying that. The Bible expressly forbids anyone from intentionally changing the text that was given by God to His people, complete with an explicit curse the He pronounced upon those who intentionally do so. God said in the last chapter of the book of Revelation that anyone who would, "add unto", or detract from the words of the prophecy of this book ( Revelation), that God would take away their part in the book of life ( meaning their eternal salvation). I know how "judgmental" that sounds, but it is not me that has pronounced the judgment, but God Himself. And God is the only one who has the legitimate right to judge any of us. We can merely accept His standards, or rebel, and I've made my choice! Therefor if I were to allow that ad, with it's blatant lie to continue to be shown on my Blog, I would be indirectly guilty of an implicit endorsement of that lie. I will not do that!!!

Unfortunately, though I've come to suspect lately that it was intentional, I found that this ad was the only one I've seen on my Blog without an "x" in the corner so that it might be rejected if I didn't approve. As I've said, I suspect that whoever placed the ad knew that it would be offensive to Bible-believing Christians, and that I could be expected to try to reject it. Therefor I suppose that they may have specifically requested ( perhaps for an additional fee) that the rejection "x" not be allowed on their ad. This I found to be an intolerable violation of my editorial rights to protect the content of my Blog, for which I have the sole legal copyright authority, not them!!! But lacking the capacity to edit the ad, I was left with the only alternative, which was to cancel the ads altogether ( though they have since been restored).

My intent was to ad an advertising capacity to my Blog in which it was obvious to my readers that I didn't necessarily agree with everything that was promoted thereon, but that I had absolutely no intention of allowing the blatant promotion of anti-Christian doctrine on my blog, nor was I ever going to forfit my editorial rights to any third party to manipulate my expressed opinions to imply something other than what I have said!!! To expect me to do so unwillingly is nothing less than a clear violation of my First Amendment Constitutional rights of Freedom of Expression, and Freedom of Religeon! And in this case at least, that, "shall not be abridged"!

NOTE TO BRIAN:
I chose to edit your comment out not because it was bad, but because it was dead wrong. I'm sorry you have chosen to believe a lie; I'm sure you are sincere, but that doesn't change the facts. If you care to argue the point by further commenting, then you can leave your E-mail address and I will respond further, but I won't use this format to argue the point further. Let me just make a few points from my perspective: 1) Why is it that the heavenly angels mentioned in the Bible have names ending in "el"( a suffix which means "of God" in Hebrew) which He obviously chose to distinguish His angels from those fallen angels of Satan, which we refer to as demons, but in Joseph Smith's case He is supposed to have sent an "angel" named Moroni to deliver the "revelation" of the book of Mormon. That seems rather Moronic to me! There is no one in heaven, or on earth throughout history that is more meticulously consistent than God. Yet He didn't give this angel a name that followed the pattern ( i.e., "Gabriel", and "Michael"); it doesn't fit. Perhaps that "angel" works for the other side? After all, Satan's very name means, "the deceiver", and Jesus said the Satan has the power to appear as an angel of light; 2) The Ummim, and the Thumim were used by the Temple High Priest ( and he alone) to cast as lots before God to determine between two choices that they wished God to use to direct the decision process for the children of Israel. Nowhere does the Bible describe them as being instruments of major divination, such as supposedly in revealing the whole book of Mormon; 3) When Jesus left this earth, in His Ascension, from the mount of Olives, the true angels told His disciples that He would return again the same way. We have record that He will touch down upon His return exactly on the mount of Olives. Nowhere does it say that he will come back first to Utah, and pronounce that the local American Indian tribes are descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. 4) Nowhere in the Bible does it say that when we go to heaven we will be changed into heavenly angels; in fact the Bible makes it very clear that we are entirely different creations from the angels; our corrupt bodies will be changed into heavenly bodies, but that is different from the angelic beings. Here are just a few inconsistencies with the book of Mormon, versus the Bible, which can not be reconciled without choosing one version over the other. Yet you say that the book of Mormon is not thought to "supplant" the Bible. Perhaps not, but it is considered to supercede the Bible in that when there is an apparent discrepancy the book of Mormon is considered to be more correct than the Bible. This amounts to a changing of the Biblical account, which is cursed of God in Revelation 18, through 21. And if Joseph Smith is guilty of changing the Biblical account, guess where that leaves him? So, your choice is simple: believe in his lies, which puts you in ultimately his same dangerous position; or recognize the truth of the Bible. You can't have it both ways when there is clear contradiction. Choose one way, or the other!

[ On the outside chance that you may be the very person who placed the ad in question on this Blog, let me say that your efforts have been largely dismissed, and the remainder will be soon. Immediately after writing this post I clicked over to my original Blog, which I have referred to above. Surprise, surprise!!! Guess what advertisement appeared on my screen?!! At least it appeared when I merely clicked the Blog. After I signed in as the Publisher, and then went back to my last post, it was discreetly gone without my efforts to remove it yet. That sounds like someone is manipulating it so I won't remove it. Well, since I don't post on that Blog very often any more, I'll let it stay temporarily as I need to do some things before I'm ready to cancel the whole Blog. But your, or whomever's, message will not reach too many pageviewers in the meantime, so the effort is essentially in vain! UPDATE: I have now saved my archive for future reference, and have cancelled my original Blog: "The End-Times News Review". I did this mostly because I was dissatisfied with the Server's quality of service, including running their ads on my Blog for years without asking my permission, or paying me a single penny for the privilege ( Kind of like Adsense has been doing on this blog for the last couple of months. There seems to be no end to the number of people who are dying to take advantage of the computer illiterate, as I am, unfortunately. Anyway, now "Mormons.org" can advertise all they want to on a blank page, and see how many they can get to swallow their deception!]