Did you ever wonder why the elites were encouraged to intermarry and yet it is illegal for US? hmmmm

Psalm 46
EXCERPT:
But even the glory of the King James Bible, compiled by a committee of 46 editors over the course of a decade, pales before the dazzling legacy of the Swan of Avon.

The lowest estimate of Shakespeare's working vocabulary is 15,000 words, more than three times that of the King James Bible, and twice the size of his nearest competitor, John Milton.

His poems and plays were written without the aid of a dictionary or a thesaurus. They didn't exist yet. It was all in his head.

When Shakespeare had a thought for which Elizabethan English had no word, he invented one.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists hundreds of everyday words and phrases which made their first appearance in the pages of the Bard.

Addiction. Alligator. Assasination. Bedroom. Critic. Dawn. Design. Dialogue. Employer. Film. Glow. Gloomy. Gossip. Hint. Hurry. Investment. Lonely. Luggage. Manager. Switch. Torture. Transcendence. Wormhole. Zany.

Hamlet alone contains nearly forty of these neologisms.

Who today would have this audacity, this giddy exuberance of invention?

Only one other English author even approaches Shakespeare's facility for coining new words: Sir. Francis Bacon.

In the modern era, the record holder is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, who, interestingly, also happens to be the second most quoted author in English, after Shakespeare.

Everyone has been profoundly molded by the influence of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Like it or not, all of us peer at the world through the lenses of these great works.

They are the primary source documents of modern English thought, the style guides of our minds.

Contemplating these dazzling jewels of wisdom and eloquence gives rise to an extraordinary feeling.

A potent, rare and precious emotion with the potential to completely upset your life.

An emotion powerful enough to make a man abandon his wife and children, forfeit career and reputation, lay down his possessions and follow his heart without questioning.

That sweet, sweet fusion of wonder and fear, irresistible attraction and soul-numbing dread known as awe.

Awe is the Grail of artistic achievement. No other human emotion possesses such raw transformative power, and none is more difficult to evoke.

Few and far between are the works of man that qualify as truly awesome.

It is awe that convinces a rabbi to spend a lifetime decoding Yahweh from the Pentateuch.

Awe that sends millions of visitors each year to the Pyramids of Giza, Guadalupe and Mecca.

It was awe that drove poor Delia Bacon to her doom.

Now, please don't come away from this lecture thinking that the key to awesome game design is the installation of Easter eggs!

Ordinary games, with their contrived Easter eggs and cheat codes, are like the Battery of the Month club.

You have to trudge down to the back of the store to get what you really came for.

If super power is what people really want, why not just give it to them?

Is our imagination so impoverished that we have to resort to marketing gimmicks to keep players interested in our games?

Awesome things don't hold anything back.

Awesome things are rich and generous.

The treasure is right there.

One afternoon, I was sitting alone behind the counter at that old Radio Shack store. My boss had stepped out for some reason.

An elderly woman walked through the front door.

Like most of our customers, she was shabbily dressed. Probably on a fixed income.

I assumed she was there for her free battery.

But instead, she placed a portable radio on the counter.

This radio came from the days when they boasted about the number of transitors inside on the case.

It was completely wrapped in dirty white medical tape.

The woman looked at me, and asked, "Can you fix this?"

Slowly I unwrapped the medical tape, peeling away the layers until the back cover of the radio fell off, accompanied by a cloud of red dust.

The interior of the radio was half eaten away by battery leakage and corrosion.

I looked at the radio. I looked at the old woman. I looked back at the radio.

I reached behind me, where the expensive alkaline batteries were hanging like prescription medication, and removed a gleaming nine-volt cell from its gold blister pack.

Then I pulled a brand-new transistor radio from a box, installed the alkaline and helped the lady find her favorite station.

No money changed hands. She left the store without saying a word.

Awesome things are kind of like that.

Bach offered his students very specific insight into the source of awe.

In addition to B-A-C-H, two other sets of initials are also associated with Bach's music.

These initials are not hidden in the notes. Instead, they're scrawled right across the top of his manuscripts for the whole world to see.

The initials are SDG and JJ.

SDG stands for the Latin phrase Soli Deo Gloria, "To the glory of God alone."

JJ stands for Jesu Juva, "Help me, Jesus."

Bach wrote all of his great masterpieces sub specie aeternitatis, "under the aspect of eternity."

He did not compose only to please his sponsors, or to win the approval of an audience. His work was his worship.

Bach once wrote, "Music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul. Where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamour and ranting."

The name of the power that moves you is not important.

What is important is that you are moved.

Awe is the foundation of religion.

No other motivation can free you from the limits of personal achievement.

Nothing else can teach you the Art of Flight.

Computer games are barely forty years old.

Only a few words in our basic vocabulary have been established.

A whole dictionary is waiting to be coined.

The slate is clean.

Someday soon, perhaps even in our lifetime, a game design will appear that will flash across our culture like lightning.

It will be easy to recognize.

It will be generous, giddy with exuberant inventiveness.

Scholars will pick it apart for decades, perhaps centuries.

It will be something wonderful. Something terrifying. Something awe-ful.

A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference in London.

My wife joined me, and we took a day off for some sightseeing.

We decided to visit England's second-biggest tourist attraction, Stratford-upon-Avon.

It was cold and rainy when our train arrived.

Luckily, most of the attractions are just a short walk from the station.

We visited Shakespeare's birthplace, a charming old house along the main street which attracts millions of pilgrims every year, despite the complete lack of any evidence that Shakespeare was born there, or even lived anywhere near it.

We went past the school where Shakespeare learned to read and write, although no documents exist to prove his attendance.

We visited Anne Hathaway's cottage, the rustic country farm where his wife spent her childhood, although no record shows anyone by that name ever having living there.

Finally we came to the one location undeniably associated with Shakespeare: Trinity Parish church, on the banks of the river Avon, where a man by that name is buried.

This beautiful church is approached by a long walkway, between rows of ancient gravestones, shaded by tall trees.

The entrance door is surprisingly tiny. No cameras are allowed inside.

The interior is dark and quiet. Despite the presence of busloads of tourists, the atmosphere is hushed and respectful. A few people are seated in the pews, deep in prayer.

An aisle leads up the center of the church.

The left side of the altar is brightly illuminated. On the wall above is a famous bust of the Bard, quill in hand, gazing serenely at the crowd of pilgrims.

On the floor beneath, surrounded by bouquets of flowers, at the very spot where Delia Bacon lost her mind, the gravestone of William Shakespeare bears this dire warning:

Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here
Blest be the man who spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones.

Every year, three million pilgrims arrive from every nation on Earth to approach this stone and consider the likeness of a man whose body of work can only be described as awesome.

By contrast, the right side of the altar is dark and featureless.

Nobody of any consequence is buried there.

The only point of interest is a wooden case, of simple design, carved of dark oak.

Inside the case, sealed beneath a thick sheet of glass, lies a large open book.

A plaque on the case identifies this book as a first edition of the King James Bible, published in 1611, when Shakespeare was 46.

Not many pilgrims visit this side of the altar.

Most of those that do simply glance at the book, read the plaque and move along.

A few, more observant, note that the Bible happens to be opened to a page in the Old Testament: the Book of Psalms, chapter 46.

No explanation is given for this particular choice of pages.

For the initiated, none is necessary.

If you are of inquisitive bent, if you are intrigued by English history and literature, if you value your peace of mind, cover your ears, now.

In the year 1900, a scholar noticed something about the King James translation of Psalm 46.

Something terrifying. Something wonderful.

The 46th word from the beginning of Psalm 46 is "shake."

The 46th word from the end is "spear."

There are only two possibilities here.

Either this is the finest coincidence ever recorded in the history of world literature. Or it is not.

The Earth revolves around only one sun, and has only one moon.

The moon happens to be 400 times smaller than the sun.

The sun happens to be 400 times farther away.

And the apparent paths of the moon and sun in our sky happen to intersect exactly twice every month.

Which means that every now and then, at long yet precisely predictable intervals, the lunar disc slips across the face of the sun and just barely conceals it for a few wonderful, terrible minutes.

A fine coincidence, no?



In June of 1977, a little man with divergent eyes and a talent for mischief ascended a hilltop in the British village of Ampthill.

At the summit of this hill is a tall, slender cross, a memorial to Catherine of Aragorn, the first wife of Henry VIII.

The sun, high in the south, cast the shadow of the cross upon the grassy hillside.

At exactly 12 noon, the man removed from his pocket a bar magnet. He turned the magnet so its north pole was facing south, and buried it under the shadow of the cross.

Two years later, a few hours before the publication of his first book, the man returned to that hillside, this time in the dead of night.

He used a compass to locate the magnet he had buried.

In that same place, he dug a hole in the ground and placed inside a ceramic container inscribed with the following words:

"I am the keeper of the Jewel of Masquerade, waiting for you, or Eternity."


King James version of the bible is counterfeit
EXCERPT:
The greatest method of deception is to counterfeit.
And the master of counterfeit and deception is Satan.

The Bible in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15 warns of Satan's counterfeit: "And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness;. . ." Isaiah 14: 14 tells of Satan's ultimate counterfeit: ". . . I will BE LIKE the most High."

And among his greatest counterfeit's is the New King James Bible (NKJV). Christians that would never touch a New International Version (NIV), New American Standard (NASV), Revised Standard (RSV), the New Revised Standard (NRSV) or other per-versions are being "seduced" by the subtil NKJV.

And though the New King James does indeed bear a "likeness" to the 1611 King James Bible, as you'll soon see, there's something else coiled (see Genesis 3:1) "underneath the cover" of the NKJV.