God, Faith, and Reason Page 5

  The very next morning, I received an e-mail from one of the most prominent leaders of the Chabad orthodox religious group in America. I had rarely spoken with him previously; I think I had met him once. Out of the blue, he told me they were having a meeting the next day in Los Angeles of eighty of the top rabbis in California. I’m talking about the heavy-duty biblical guys. There were no other attendees who were not rabbis, but he was inviting me. I had no idea why they had thought of me.

  I told him I considered it a high honor, but I couldn’t go. I had just returned from LA and the next day had to go for a bone implant. So I didn’t attend the conference, but I’m telling you, it was weird. I know that by my wanting to reach out to my spiritual road and get back to being connected with my spirituality, I must have contacted some kind of vibration in the universe that has come back down to this plane and had an immediate reverberation in my life.

  That’s how it works. Once you tune in or you contact the spiritual core of your own being, which resonates with the higher power, the higher power resonates back down to the earth and does things for us. I don’t know. But I sense that that’s how it works. There is a resonance factor.

  The Amulet

  A very special thing has occurred. I’m holding an amulet in my hand. Do you know what an amulet is? Christians, they don’t believe in amulets. They think they’re anti-God. They don’t understand that some amulets bring you closer to God, not farther away. As I said before, for years Catholics in America had little plastic statues of St. Christopher in their cars. Then the statues gave way to dream catchers. That was the end of America as far as I knew it. Those statues were icon-effigies the Catholics had. That didn’t make them less Catholic, did it? What about wearing a cross? Is that not a sort of amulet, a protection against evil? It is.

  What I’m getting at is somewhat related to the St. Christopher medal thing. When Americans drove around in Dodge Darts and other big American cars in the 1970s, there were St. Christopher statues all over America. Suddenly we woke up in the 1990s and there were dream catchers hanging off the mirrors. Every girl in the Bay Area with chlamydia was driving around with a dream catcher, hoping the dream catcher would cure her. It didn’t work.

  A while back, I was somewhere I hadn’t been in years. It was a house I used to live and work in. For sixteen years I had done radio shows out of that home. When I was a local host, it took me years to get the local station to permit me to do a remote broadcast out of my house. I had to argue and beg for it for years to let me put in a home studio. Then when I did, I wound up feeling more isolated than I ever had in my life, and I dreamed of being back at the radio station. There’s something about the stink of the garbage can in the studio, the stink of perfume that people would leave there, that could blind you. One of the reasons I like a home studio is that I’m a germophobic person. I never got the flu in there. It’s me and the dog. He doesn’t get the flu.

  So, after the renovation, I moved back into the old house and the old home studio. Naturally, things had been left there, including paintings, pictures, photographs, some of the curtains. I found stuff that I had long forgotten.

  One night, I stayed there during a rainstorm. I wanted to be away from the Bay. It was too noisy, the pounding, crashing surf, wet and wild. In a box I had stored, I found an ivory object inscribed in Hebrew. The back was a cheap sort of metal, like silver, and there were tinkling things hanging from it.

  I knew it was an amulet from the Middle East. I think I had bought it in Israel many years before. I had bought two of them, as a matter of fact. I don’t even know what was on it. I remember when my mother was alive, I showed her the amulet. She never really related to anything I did. For some weird reason that I never understood until recently, she looked at that amulet and said, “That’s very interesting that you brought that back from Israel. What is it?” She touched it, and I saw some electricity go through her. Until I found it again, I had forgotten about that. I had put the amulet aside. I had left it in a box and forgotten it.

  One night, after returning from a pub, I ripped a muscle in my neck. I had hurt my neck years before, and a masseuse had almost destroyed it. I never let that woman near me again. She’s a monster. I got over that; then I hurt the other side of my neck.

  In the house I’ve been telling you about, there’s an exercise machine. I hate exercise machines. They’re inhuman. Normally, I confine my regimen to natural exercises such as push-ups, sit-ups, bicycling, etc. But for some weird reason I wanted to get into shape again, and I started pulling down on the pull-down bar on that inhuman machine. I must have ripped the muscle again. The pain was excruciating, but I wouldn’t even take an aspirin for it. I’m stoic when it comes to that kind of pain. I don’t want to start in with pills.

  I looked at the amulet and said to myself, “Wait a minute, hold on. I don’t believe in magic, but I believe in God.” Was it a coincidence that I found that amulet from the Holy Land that I must have bought in 1978? I don’t even remember exactly where I bought it. I think it was from a Yemenite peddler in a marketplace in Jerusalem. I bought two of them. As I say, my mother noted it, even though she was not very religious. But I know there’s some kind of mystical streak in my family line on her side.

  Many women have clairvoyant abilities, can see things others can’t see. What gives them that extra power of seeing? Where does it come from? Well, it’s inherent. It’s genetic, okay. They inherited it, usually from their mother’s line but not always. You can call it many things. If you work on the dark side, it’s called witchcraft. If you work on the good side, it’s not called witchcraft, right? Amulets of any kind can be put to either good or evil use.

  Now, you may be a skeptical and very rational person who doesn’t believe in any of this crap. You may say it’s nonsense. But do you carry anything around with you for good luck? Do you carry anything on an airplane? Did any of you carry anything into battle that you believe protected you? That’s what I’m talking about.

  For many years I was into herbal medicine. For many years I wrote books on healing. I was in clinical practice as a healer for only a few years after I received my doctorate, from about 1978 to 1980 or ’81. I wasn’t ready for it then. Now if I get sick, I go only to medical doctors. I try to heal myself to avoid the need for modern medicine, but once I have an acute condition, I use modern medicine.

  Obviously, I take tons of the right vitamins and use herbal medicine when I need to. I’ve always known, since I was a young man, that I have healing powers. Some of us have them, some don’t. I don’t mean clinical or technical, I’m talking about actual physical, spiritual healing powers. Now, I have avoided this part of my being for a long time, for many reasons. I don’t want to wind up being accused of or becoming a fake guru. Let me be very clear about that. You can easily take your own Kool-Aid here, and you can wind up on a ranch in Antelope, Oregon, with twenty-five Rolls Royces and fifty women, and then have to flee the state for Denmark.

  So I must be very careful of my own strengths and powers. You know and I know that in this world, but for the grace of God, you or I could have wound up a homeless person in the gutter, instead of who we are. Am I right or wrong? Do you think everything you have in your life, all the blessings you have, are there only because of yourself? It’s because of God’s power and will. I’ve known this all my life.

  What I’m saying to you from my perspective is also true in reverse. That poor, unfortunate person in the street could have been you. It’s a matter of chance. Things happen to people. Who can say what makes a person down on his luck or why something goes wrong in her life? Or why a child gets cancer? I can’t. I have no knowledge about any of that.

  Let me go back to the amulet I found. I bought two of them in Israel in the 1970s, put them aside, and paid no attention to them for decades. Then I found one right after I had pulled a muscle in my neck. I picked it up and said, “I know this thing has power.” I put it on my neck and said, “I don’t believe in magic, but I
believe in God.”

  A man also or a woman that divineth by a ghost or a

  familiar spirit, shall surely be put to death;

  —Leviticus 20:27

  I stayed there in bed holding it to the muscle that was ripped. And I have to tell you from the bottom of my heart, the pain subsided within three to four minutes. It came back the next morning. I can hear the nonbelievers saying, “Ah, it’s mind over matter, don’t be stupid. Come on, you’re a man of science, don’t be a fool. What do you believe in that for?”

  I decided that night that I’m going to keep trying this thing on people in my life who are sick. As I write this, I can feel the heat right now, because I just put it on my neck. I can feel the whole heat of my body in this thing. I know it has tremendous power. It’s a secret thing.

  I know these are Yemenite amulets. I can tell by the design of the jewelry and what’s on the little hanging trinkets. Now, you never see Jews in America with this. They’re modern Jews, they don’t believe in any of this stuff. I don’t know what they believe in, but that’s their business. Each person’s different.

  One day, I called a rabbi known for mysticism and said, “I need to meet some rabbis who are into mysticism.” I told him some problems I was having in my life, and I asked him to do something for me. He said, “No, Michael, you’re so powerful. You’re the rabbi. You have to do it for yourself.” He said, “You speak to God.”

  Not long ago, I called him again. He was so excited to hear from me. I had sent him an e-mail picture of the amulet for him to translate the Hebrew. He said to me, “Michael, listen to what is written on the amulet in Hebrew. It’s the blessing of Joseph. It says, ‘You are my son, and the evil eye cannot hurt you. You are like the fish, and no evil eye can get to you. If you believe in God, no evil eye can touch you. When you get conceited, the evil eye can touch you.’”

  He also said, “Tell all your listeners today that if they have had luck in their life and they are rich people or they’re wealthy or they’re doing well, to watch out for conceit. The minute they are filled with conceit, the evil eye will touch them.” He continued, “This is the most important thing that I have to tell you, because it so happens that what you told me today about that amulet is, by coincidence, Michael, the exact weekly portion of the Torah to Jewish people. Passage 49:22, blessings of Joseph. Don’t flaunt your wealth, or people will be jealous of you. You are my son, and the evil eye cannot hurt you. You are like the fish, and no evil eye can get you.”

  How Sensitive Do You Want to Be?

  There’s a trend in America and the West now where people are overly sensitive to the living things around them. We all know about vegan diet. People think it’s healthier. This is not a book about nutrition, so I won’t get into that. But I do want to talk about people becoming so sensitive to animal life that they refuse to eat animals or animal products. I understand that. It would be hard to find many people who would not become vegetarians after visiting a slaughterhouse or watching a film of what happens inside a slaughterhouse, seeing the fear in the animals’ eyes and hearing their cries as they’re killed. I understand the sympathy people have for them.

  But there are also people who say that they can hear the trees crying in a newly built home or a newly built cabin. I remember reading about this in a story by a rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish tradition Chabad, written sometime in the seventeenth century in Russia or Poland. One of the sages wrote that when he went into a newly built cabin, he could hear the trees it was made of cry. There’s another story about the son of one of the great sages who took a leaf off a tree as he was walking in the forest with his father, and the father admonished him, saying, “How can you be so insensitive to ruin something that is so alive for no reason whatsoever?”

  So how sensitive you want to be is the question. How tuned in do you want to be to the voices that travel around the world that no one can hear except the very few, the mad and the enlightened? And what are the voices that we’re talking about? They can be anything. They can be the voices of people crying out as they die, the voices of spirits, things of that nature. How sensitive do you want to be is always the question.

  In my own life, I do not think it’s that important to tune in to such an extent that you lose the scope of the world in which we are living, the here and now, the world where our feet are planted on the ground. This earth is the only heaven for so many billions of people, and we must learn to live in this heaven God has created. Sure, there may be an afterlife, but we don’t know that for sure. The only world we have direct knowledge of is this world, which we must not mess up. So how sensitive you want to be becomes not so much a question as a statement. Being insensitive makes you oafish, but being overly sensitive can render you incapable of living on this earth.

  Dominion

  According to Genesis, God told Adam and Eve:

  Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.

  There are some things in the Bible I don’t happen to agree with. Does it make me an anti-God, anti-religious person? No, I would say that people must evolve past the original message. I mean, we don’t kill adulterers anymore, do we? Do we kill homosexuals? Not unless you’re a retrograde, throwback Islamist. There are many things in the Bible that must be taken in the context of the times, and one of them is the passage I quoted above. What does “have dominion” really mean? Does it mean you should slaughter animals mercilessly and eat them? I don’t think so. In fact, I interpret having dominion to mean protecting them.

  I know I’m not alone because I talk to people of all belief systems, political and spiritual, every day on The Savage Nation. I particularly remember a caller who shared my interpretation of dominion. She thanked me for sharing it and said, “I think when you love God, you love all of His creatures and His creations. And I am so glad that you talked about this today.”

  And God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’

  —Genesis 1:26

  We must understand there comes a point in human evolution when we must evolve in our observations about not only ourselves or the earth or the cosmos but about animals, too. They’re not all there for our pleasure or just to kill and eat them. That’s not what having dominion means.

  We have dominion over many things that we don’t necessarily consume to the point of destroying them. What do you think crop rotation is for? What about your car? You don’t drive it as fast as it goes or beat it up by taking curves fast or peeling out when the light turns green. That’s not just because you might get a ticket. It’s also because you need that car to last a long time. Therefore, you forgo the pleasure of pushing it to its limit every time you drive it so it will be there for you next year and the year after.

  That’s called conservation. I wrote in Trump’s War about why conservation is a core conservative political principle that modern conservatives should reclaim. Well, I have news for you. It’s a core spiritual concept as well, which is directly related to the passage in Genesis about having dominion over the earth and its living inhabitants.

  I remember another caller who echoed the political side of this argument on my show. She told me, “I liked your comment. I liked you bringing up the environmental issue because you’re right. Many Republicans, many conservatives do not talk about this issue. Um, it’s passed off and people turn their nose up at it, but it is very important because this earth is all that we have.”

  It’s not inconsistent for a person to be a political conservative and a conservationist. In fact, they’re unified. They’re brother-and-sister issues. Conservation is not an issue that should be controlled by the so-called radical Left. We should control that issue. But the brother and siste
r have another sibling, the soul. Being a conservationist is truly the way to follow God’s command in Genesis to exercise dominion over all living things.

  One of the callers I referred to had a classical education and had studied Latin. She said she had learned Latin “growing up,” which means she may have been home schooled. I don’t know. But she made a very important point. She said she believed that the word dominion in the Bible came from the Latin word dominus, which translates literally as “lord” or “master.” She said, “That can mean caretaker, that can mean protector.”

  That’s precisely what I’m talking about in terms of the relationship between dominion and conservation. God is our Lord and Master, but He doesn’t hurt or destroy us for His own pleasure. On the contrary, He created the universe, the natural laws, above all reason, for precisely the opposite reasons. He wanted to allow us to thrive, to grow, to maximize our potential happiness. He gave us free will knowing we would often act contrary to His wishes, but without which we could not achieve goodness or happiness.

  There is a correlation between God’s dominion over us and our dominion over plants and animals. It is not a direct, one-to-one correlation. Just as we are made in God’s image but are not gods ourselves, so, too, is our dominion over animals analogous to God’s dominion over us, but not equal. God does not need to consume us to survive as we need to consume living things to survive.

  That’s right, we need to consume living things, either plants or animals, to survive. We can’t live on dirt. Sometimes I wonder if our psychotic liberal friends even admit that to themselves. That is another point on which political conservatism, conservation, and God’s Word all converge. This physical world is imperfect, as we are imperfect. We cannot achieve the sublime perfection of Heaven on Earth. But we can strive for it, understanding that perfection is impossible.