Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

"The phrase 'battling' the principalities and powers took on a whole new aspect, prayer becoming as physical as any piece of steel or iron they could wield against an enemy along with their holy water and crucifixes.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

We are in a war. This war has many aspects. Long ago, the publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise and author of dozens of really great books, L. Neil Smith, pointed out that we are in a culture war, and if you want to win such a war, you have to have a culture. Very happily, libertarians, voluntaryists, anarcho-capitalists, and science fiction enthusiasts have a culture with many strong and great ideas. Vital among these ideas is the zero aggression principle. Also vital: the covenant of unanimous consent—a majority, even a "super majority" cannot impose consent on those who dissent. Ever.

Private property and individual liberty are inextricably intertwined, and these are so key that Neil coined the term "propertarian" to convey the idea that freedom works with property as a key basis for it. He also once showed how important it is to understand history as it really occurred, and as it might have been, by writing about a parallel narrative thread in the multi-verse in which a single word was changed in the Declaration of Independence that led to the disgrace of the constitutional convention framers such as Hamilton and Washington during the (successful in that reality) Whiskey Rebellion.

It is also a war with territories. The big cities are mostly held by the forces of communism and tormented by the oligarchs who claim total power. The rural counties and mountains are mostly held by free thinkers. Some of us are starting intentional communities. I like to describe these with the phrase Voluntaryists & Agorists Living In Absolute Non-Aggression Today (VALIANT). I'm working with many others on such communities all over the world and on dirigibles in the sky.

Spiritual War

You are also in a spiritual war. You are in a war against powers of darkness and evil. You have known this fact for many years.

You knew when you learned about Epstein Island and the rape of children there. You knew when you learned that the oligarchs rape and traumatise children, kill them, and drink their adrenochrome-rich blood. You knew when you learned how many of the prominent people in politics and business flew to Epstein's pedophile island. You knew when you found out, thanks to the work of Professor RJ Rummel, that 262 million people were killed in genocides by governments and 55 million were killed in wars between governments, in the 20th Century alone. You knew when you learned that 78 million Falun Gong were kept in prison camps and harvested for their organs for medical tourism.

In Ephesians, chapter 6, St. Paul explains: "Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, For which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak."

Prayer is a positive and useful action you can take any time. And a good time to pray is right now.

My Path

Your path is yours and yours alone, and I do not walk your path. You do. If my path is near unto yours for a time, perhaps I may shine some light on your path, and you upon mine. But do not mistake my meaning when I talk about what I believe and what I view as the path before me. I speak for myself, and do not say that your path is like mine.

I do say that I am not afraid of what is ahead, because I know that we are not here because of the path before us, but because of the path behind us. We are here because for thousands of years the forces of tyranny and injustice have tried to enslave us, have tried to destroy us, have tried to deprive us of our freedom. And I know what is most important of all. They have failed because we are still here!

When I was born, my body was a very yellow colour due to Rh factor incompatibility jaundice. My dad once said that I was the yellowest baby he had ever seen. Dad was a nuclear physicist and a good one. I believe it was a paper he wrote for the Norwegian admiralty in which the term "melt down" was first used to describe what happens when a nuclear reactor's cooling and control systems all fail. Dad followed a scientific philosophy, including the work of Hans Reichenbach, who viewed anything that cannot be mesured as "metaphysics."

My mom was raised in a family of believers and for various reasons came to be agnostic. She once said, "I don't know if there is a God, and I don't think you know, either." Nevertheless, the bible I own was given to me by her when I took a class on "The Bible as Literature" in high school. It developed that when I quizzed out of Basic English, that was the only alternative for me to take. So we read the Old Testament in the first semester, and the New Testament in the second semester of that class.

Since then, I have had a great many spiritual experiences. Yet, even before then, some things of a spiritual nature were happening to me. I had a waking vision as a child during an extreme illness that I now believe was Lyme disease, because it took place after a large tick was removed from me, and the symptoms match. At the time, that diagnosis was unknown, so I was very sick for about six months. Also as a child, I had a recurring dream in which I was flying through the air with another person, and was told that I had been "sent ahead."

More recently, it came to my attention that as a child I found out that I could whisper both while exhaling and while inhaling. I remember a conversation with my brother Ken in which I showed him this ability, and he was impressed. It develops that today many of my prayers I say in a whisper, and I breathe prayer in and breathe prayer out. I can teach this technique if you need help with it.

Being a dutiful child in many ways, I accepted the outlook my parents held and called myself an agnostic for many years. I asked Jesus into my heart in 1997. I became a Quaker in 2018. I began to pray the rosary this year. And I have seen people healed, people saved, people baptised in water, people baptised in the Holy Spirit, storms called and storms rebuked. God has all the power there is, and God hears our prayers.

So, in some ways that would be surprising to who I was as a child, I have become very familiar with prayer. One of the experiences of the last decade, some time in 2012 or 2013 if I recall correctly, that has been very significant to me in recent months, was a time when my mom talked to me about the rosary. For no reason that I understood, one evening at supper, when we were alone together, after my dad passed, she said that she wanted to tell me what she knew about the rosary. I told her that it was a topic in which I had zero interest. I'm not sure how I expressed this thought, but it is my clear recollection that I was not interested. Nevertheless, she was determined.

So she told me what she had been taught, and told it in a way that I remember still. It turns out that her description of the rosary exactly matches my rosary that I purchased earlier this year. Also, that conversation was important in helping me to understand the ideas behind the rosary and to seek more information about it.

Right now I am sitting in a room with a wall paper border of roses. I've prayed the rosary six times today and plan to pray it again after finishing this essay. Yesterday I prayed ten rosaries. At times in recent months, I've prayed more than twenty.

What Is The Rosary?

There is a physical object, the rosary, which looks like a long necklace on which there are beads, medallions, and a crucifix, connected by chains. Mine has onyx beads, pewter medallions, a black and silver crucifix, and each medallion has St. Benedict on one side and a cross with the initials of his "Vade Retro Satana" prayer by which he cast out many demons.

The prayers involved are the Apostle's Creed (prayed once, at the beginning, on the crucifix); the Our Father or Lord's Prayer (prayed six times on the smaller medallions); the Glory Be, prayed 61 times on the chains); the Hail Mary (prayed 53 times on the beads); the Fatima prayer (prayed eight times before each medallion); and the Hail Holy Queen (prayed once, at the end, holding the large medallion). Thus there are 130 prayers. These are important and useful in and of themselves. For example, the Lord's Prayer was taught by Jesus to his disciples when they asked how they should pray.

The rosary is also a series of meditations. In the short segment after the crucifix, one meditates on the importance of prayer and clears one's mind of the routine. Each set of meditations thereafter begins with an Our Father, continues with a series of Glory Be and Hail Mary alternating and the ten beads being described as "a decade;" and ends with the Fatima prayer.

When I began praying the rosary, having asked God whether I should buy one and whether I should learn to pray it, I was told to pray only the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries, and not the very recently added (by pope John Paul II) so-called " Luminous" mysteries. You can read about these in any reasonably comprehensive work on the rosary, including the Wikipedia and the "For Dummies" texts.

The rosary is also a spiritual weapon. It is a weapon that has been used against demons and against spiritual darkness. It is associated with the Virgin Mary, the Holy Queen, the mother of Jesus, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, our hope.

It is she who has held her mantle over the world all these years, beseeching her son not to smite the Earth. It is her intercession that has brought solace to many sinners, surcease to many suffering, healing to many sick and injured, and many other miracles. She has asked that we pray the rosary, and that we pray for the souls in this world.

It is my request as well. Pray as you think best, and may your prayers be heard, always, God's will be done. Amen.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, actor, and director. He is the vision director of HoustonSpaceSociety.net You can find him on Twitter.com/planetaryjim as well as Pocket.app and Flote.app also as planetaryjim. He appreciates any support you can provide as times are very difficult. See the Paypal link on this page. Or email your humble author to offer other choices. Visit IglooLuau.com for more information. Those seeking a multi-jurisdiction multi-hop VPN for communications privacy please visit https://secure.cryptohippie.com/houstonspacesociety.php For those seeking colloidal silver try ppmSilver.com/Jim Ask Jim about CryptoWealth. Coming soon: FreedomLandDAO dot com—not yet hosted. Just arrived: FreedomDeFiSoftware.com