That is Completely UN Scriptural

I recently read the book, The Hiram Key. It was a fairly addictive book and had lots of little interesting historical data points. All was going along good until about Ch 12. The guys started making some pretty wild guesses and then asserting on what Jesus did or did not believe about his mission. Sadly, they really didn’t cite a whole lot of sources for these assertions. What I found ironic was that at the start of the book, they didn’t want get into a situation of not considering both sides of an issue or being lead down a path erroneously.

They ultimately connected quite a bit of history – though some of it did feel a bit loose.

For starters, they cited Henry Ford as saying History is Bunk. Apparently, there is more to that quote – even though what Ford states is probably true.

What I did find interesting was the connection they attempted to establish between the Jerusalem church and James vs. the Roman church. Though they didn’t cite a whole lot, I think most of this was based on a guy named Allegro.

If they had done a better job of citing sources and not introducing assertions on what various historical characters believed or did not without any support, then I think it would have been a better book.

Overall I would say that the book was worth reading, but many of the conclusions seemed a bit off.

I’ve read several accounts of near death experiences over the last week or so. One book was called “At Peace in the Light” by Dannion Brinkley. I read through it in about 4-5 hours. It was easy reading; however, I started to dive a little deeper into some things that caught my eye.

First he had mentioned that the Chernobyl accident was part of the prophecies he was given AND that the word Chernobyl meant wormwood in Ukranian. I looked this up. It seems that this may not be the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. What was otherwise a great book I found to be a bit disappointing given this error.

The next thing was a quote he used from a Dr. Benjamin Rush. The same quote taken from an online article http://www.conservapedia.com/Benjamin_Rush:

Physicians like to quote what Dr. Benjamin Rush reportedly said about the Constitution around 1787:

“The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic. … Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers.”

Rush did not attend that convention and did not sign the U.S. Constitution draft there.

Rush Medical College in Chicago, like the city itself, this received its charter in March of 1837.

Okay, so maybe he got the quote wrong – or was just telling the story while someone else wrote the actual book.  Paul Perry co-authored the book. I suspect that is where the quote came from, but who knows.

Well what about his predictions. From what I can tell, he put very few of the predictions down before hand, but I did happen to find this  from the La Times (http://articles.latimes.com/1995-03-24/news/ls-46593_1_death-experience?pg=4):

“Still to come, says Brinkley: a 1995 nuclear disaster in Norway and a U.S. economic collapse by 2000. ”

Well, we all know how that U.S. economic collapse went. It fell in November of 2000, but then recovered? Perhaps the worst is yet to come?

On the Norway thing and the Soviets dumping nuclear waste into the sea I did find this article (http://www.russiajournal.com/node/1113):

“The Soviet Union scrapped its nuclear submarines in a very Soviet way: the military secretly dumped radioactive waste into the sea (mainly into the Kara Sea and Barents Sea). There are seven major burial sites of radioactive waste at Novaya Zemlya, the site of a former nuclear testing range.”

The interesting thing is that the Edgar Cayce predictions indicated that a lot of stuff would hit the fan around 1998 if memory serves. I don’t think that has happened yet, but I do see evidence of the collapse of the US dollar as mentioned by Dannion Brinkley.