As a part of my journey, I was involved in the pentecostal church for about 15 years. During that time I attended Bible College and spent a number of years as a lay preacher. The strong emphasis in the fundamentalist part of Christianity is to absolutely decry the possibility of salvation by works (by knowledge or good deeds) and to emphasise that it is only possible to achieve salvation through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus - and of course by attending the local church and tithing....... but I digress. Over the years I preached many sermons, heard many more and also read prodigiously in the published work available to a pentecostal minister. I heard many sermons and delivered a few myself on the subject of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and of course the imagery in the church is also that the pastor is the local shepherd. (Amazing, with this thought, how many pentecostal ministers have been defrocked over the years for preying on their congregations, or at least the young female parts of them, because God told them it is was OK.)
I am just amazed in retrospect that I never once questioned that shepherd image, never once thought it through, never once considered WHY the shepherd is so diligent in looking after his sheep. And I never heard anybody else do it either. Yet now, with the knowledge I have recently acquired about the Matrix, the control system and the food chain, the imagery is so apt and so appropriate and tells such a powerful story if you have the ears to hear and the eyes to see. It is amazing how blind you can be when you are asleep.
The black humour side of me can just imagine how amused the beings in the control system must have been when they put that image into such a prominent place in Christianity. Assuming they have any sort fo sens of humour, these guys must literally wet themselves laughing at the foolishness of we who parrot the story and cannot see what we are actually alluding to. None so blind as they who will not see.
I am just amazed in retrospect that I never once questioned that shepherd image, never once thought it through, never once considered WHY the shepherd is so diligent in looking after his sheep. And I never heard anybody else do it either. Yet now, with the knowledge I have recently acquired about the Matrix, the control system and the food chain, the imagery is so apt and so appropriate and tells such a powerful story if you have the ears to hear and the eyes to see. It is amazing how blind you can be when you are asleep.
The black humour side of me can just imagine how amused the beings in the control system must have been when they put that image into such a prominent place in Christianity. Assuming they have any sort fo sens of humour, these guys must literally wet themselves laughing at the foolishness of we who parrot the story and cannot see what we are actually alluding to. None so blind as they who will not see.