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Sad at so many friends leaving
Big Cat's third go at finding the Spirit came after Scientology did its engram-seeking thing, only to find all the confessing apparently didn't impress the Holy Spirit, who he still couldn't find.
The Charismatic Christian movement* interested me because of its impressive growth in members attracted away from mainstream Christian denominations over the very thing that concerned me - finding the Holy Spirit.
The Charismatic church I checked out one Sunday in 1992 was carrying out an induction of about 100 defectors mostly from the Baptist Church. I went along and enrolled in not just one but two of the 14 weekday meetings set up for the men in this new influx. I wanted to learn quickly.
The influx roughly trebled the congregation to almost 400. But unfortunately for me and the other new members, it failed in our hope of seeing the Spirit.
The first sign that the Charismatic influx wasn't going to stick around came when attendance almost immediately fell off at the men's meetings. Within a few months the 14 weekday meetings were down to four.
Why? Because most of the men couldn't get excited about reading the Bible as much as the meetings required. They found it a very hard book to read and were impatient about seeing the Holy Spirit show up.
To the majority, men and women alike, the Spirit simply didn't show up. By about a year later half of the Charismatic newcomers were gone.
Many of the Charismatic influx defected to the local big Pentecostal church that has the same attraction for Christians as Sydney's famous Hillsong further west. (Both are mega churches in the mainstream of church growth today.)
I stuck at being a member of the Charismatic church but the departure of all my new friends made at the men's meetings made me very sad.
However, imagine my joy when overseas preachers began coming to the church in the third year, telling about a phenomenon in North America where the Holy Spirit was "indeed showing up".
Big Cat picks up the quest's exciting new twist in Intrepid 4 next week.
* Helpful links:
A typical Charismatic church mission statement, including "we fully expect the Holy Spirit to equip and empower us."
Keywords about Holy Spirit 
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September 28th 2007 02:43
Abuse and crime: Big Cat journeys from his "truth" closer to real truth. About bad conscience, learning from Scientology and (next) Christianity.
Operating a bit like an earlier version of John Saffron investigating cults, religion, etc, about 1990 I submitted to interview sessions at Scientology's Sydney Pitt Street headquarters.
My teenage son was already involved with Scientology, so I had additional incentive to find out about their doings.
Doings like sessions one-on-one where the Scientology person is monitoring your answers with a lie detector, connected like a clothes peg to your thumb the same way as a blood pressure indicator.
The aim was to find things in the brain called "engrams", being some kind of repository of negative energy caused by the negative decisions for which a person is responsible.
The lie detector had a screen with a seismic line that jumped on encountering any "engram" in any answer. All sorts of personal questions got asked. And answered. Ooops! Later I read somewhere that Scientology had a people file-sharing arrangement with the CIA.
In Scientology, I was interested if their "engrams" detector could spot anything that my conscience didn't already know. It didn't. I came to realise that lie detectors can't even expose things that a person has "buried", if the burying process desensitises the reactions in a person that the detector relies upon. But they are good for spotting where a person is in denial of the dictates of his/her conscience. In -other-words lying.
Lying is a sin. But, like psychiatrists, Scientologists prefer to stay off the subject of sin which is about abusing God. They are concerned with actions and speech that abuses others and, if laws of the land are involved, crime.
Next post in this series, Intrepid (3): Big Cats relates Scientology's engrams to early Christianity's "strongholds of the mind".
Home site's keywords page about conscience.
Intrepid 1 Reporter digs into Dalai Lama's job about Christians speaking in tongues was Big Cat's first in this series.
Comments made to another member's site about Nicole Kidman and Scientology.
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September 23rd 2007 06:30
Last night's ABC showing of the final in the present series of Dr Who was highly evocative emotionally and even spiritually. No wonder it has a cult-like following of avid supporters. Even older, mildly avid viewers like me get excited enough to want to write about it.
It's interesting to see how biblically similar the plots of Dr Who have become. Last night we glimpsed a foretelling of the end of the world, a furnace for all Earth's poor souls trapped in their individual spheres.
Dr Who stands for the good time lord. The other time lord stood for evil. He enslaved the people, called himself the master and made broadcasts obliging the people to rejoice in him.
Had the plot followed the biblical way, his ending might have been in the furnace too. But no, the scriptwriters decided on another ending. After loosing his powers then receiving a life- threatening shot to the chest, the master preferred to suicide. Faced with the alternative of prison locked in the Tardis (Dr Who's time machine), he refused to use his time lord's capability to regenerate.
"I win", the master uttered just before dying in the arms of Dr Who, who pleaded with him to regenerate.
Earlier the evil master heard the word's from Dr Who that he most dreaded and definitely did not want to hear. "I forgive you", said Dr Who. More highly evocative script.
So what is it in us that gets evoked when we see something like this? Why do we get so excited that we seek out others with whom to share the experience? Some in these groups get so enamoured that they organise international travel to places where these fictitious events were said to have taken place. Adherents to the story of The Da Vinci Code do this, and travel tour operators to Europe are happy to oblige.
Does anyone remember the kid's film "Never Ending Story", especially the part where the boy reading the book is confronted when the book seems to speak to him something like this: "Children's disbelief in fairy tales is the reason that the heaven for kids is disintegrating - and your own disbelief in this story at this moment."
An adult in the cinema audience of about age 35 at the time, I was no kid. But at that moment in the film, the book seemed to be talking to adults too. I had the sense that my disbelief had dire consequences far beyond just me.
That is why I write the kind of thing for Orble readers that I do now, observing things like this: How interesting that the Dr Who scriptwriters picked prison in the Tardis time machine as Dr Who's penalty intended for the master. Because in the bible the devil faces a thousand years prison from the time of Christ's second coming until the very end of the Millennium period. Then he gets a release like Napoleon got from the Island of Elba, to cause even more torment and misery in a final battle.
Dr Who is fiction. Never Ending Story is fiction. But Napoleon was real. Which is most exciting, fiction or truth? Which is most evocative? And what is it in us that gets evoked?
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September 13th 2007 00:45
Big Cat became the intrepid reporter after the Dalai Lama recently admitted publicly that he didn't know the meaning of life.
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"Tired of the www treadmill?
Here's good news for every 'PCer' tired of the www's perpetual treadmill of gaining knowledge. There's a mainframe that transcends with 'Reality' what the world wide web can only give by virtual reality. And connection with the mainframe is available now.
Every PCer already has a 'connecting file'. But it resides out of the PCer's reach in the 'mainframe recycle bin'. It can, however, be restored
[ Click here to read more ]
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- It's a region where religious fanatics have a long history, like the mass-murder when British-held Khartoum fell in 1885 -
How would you like to be a Darfur dad trying to feed eight children, or the mum whose oldest kid got butchered by Arab militiamen right in front of your eyes
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- Aceh July 2006: Coastal landing craft takes on imported timber -
The world aid outpouring was to pass US$4.6 billion via the hundreds of organisations, both government and non government (NGOs), that rushed to help in Aceh and Nias in Indonesia's far north where the 2004 Boxing Day Force 9 earthquakes and tsunamis were centred.
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- With all Aceh's wharves destroyed by tsunami waves, landing ships supplied straight onto the beaches -
Reviewing supply after the disaster struck - Some of ACs most clicks posts for Indonesia-Relief.Org - full posts available here
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- Irwandi Yusuf (BBC pic) -
Former Aceh separatist leaders and candidates in this week's first elections in Indonesia's northern-most province have strongly disagreed with the official line that land issues are the main reason for tens of thousands of Acehnese still without houses, despite more than US$4.6 billion of international aid channelled through Indonesia's Bureau of Reconstruction for Aceh and Nias (BRR).
A former Aceh-separatist (GAM) leader, Irwandi Yusuf, is the likely Governor-elect as a result of Aceh's first elections which were held this week. According to two separate election monitoring groups, Irwandi is set to win easily, said a BBC report
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Comment by Big Cat
on The Mission of Christianity
Chatterpillar
When readers consider their particular possible missions, I wonder what they think of God's own mission, in order to be a part of it.
Like: God wants His glory expressed throughout the world through Christ's body of sons and daughters.
To go a little deeper: This glory is the expression of God's virtues, which are ready for distribution in the spiritual body of His beloved first resurrected one, Christ.
BigCat (Ozpillar)