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Here is a review of my book Protect and Serve available on Amazon by Dylan Ward of The US Review of Books.
“They began to pray that something would take place very soon so that they could change their lives for good.”
Author Raimondo returns with an intriguing second novel based on two Bible verses, Matthew 25:40 and 25:45, weaving together a surprisingly uplifting tale of spirituality exploring the ramifications of crime and punishment. The Lord walks among the city streets disguised as a “Homeless Man,” wearing white shoes emblemed with blood-red crosses on their sides. He keeps a close watch on two Italian detective cousins, fresh from a big win in a major case but inexplicably nicknamed with “infamous monikers”—Alfonzo Hitali (Hitler) and Mose Dalini (Mussolini). The detectives patrol while engaging in deep debate as they protect and serve their city. One night, after meeting two prostitutes, the four encounter the Homeless Man. It is a life-changing moment that develops unexpected relationships and positive futures.
Meanwhile, recent crimes against children anger Al and Mose’s mafia uncle, Chich the Key. As the detectives become embroiled in a major new case, their uncle enacts a plan of revenge against the potential perpetrators. As Raimondo steadily builds the tension, Al and Mose find themselves walking a fine line between loyalty to their careers amid their uncle’s nefarious dealings and embracing new loves.
Though plot-heavy and action-driven, Raimondo’s book is a convincing, atmospheric detective mystery with fleshed-out characters who discover more about themselves and their beliefs when thrust into difficult situations. Clearly, the author’s faith factors into this tale full of drama and romance, especially with the fascinating and thought-provoking debates of good and evil between Al and Mose. As Raimondo states in his acknowledgment, this second book of the Least of Brothers series is just “part of an ongoing saga,” so readers and fans certainly have something to look forward to with the next stimulating book in this growing series.
Electric Cars Are A Scam for utility companies and people like Elon Musk, who owns charging stations. The average person worldwide is being made to believe your gas car runs on gas. That is a half-truth your gas car runs on electricity. You can have a full gas tank, and your car won’t start without a battery. If Elon Musk, whom many people seem to think is a billionaire hero, is really a major con man. He owns the Tesla charging stations, so you need to recharge your battery. But if this con man, also the CEO of Space X, was honest, he would add the one thing in your gas car, and your EV would never need charging, which would really help the environment. Now very machinic knows the one thing you gas car needs to keep the electricity flowing, so your car keeps running. All Musk needs to install is two parts; your EV never needs charging.
Here is what happened in the Garden of Eden and why Adam is not responsible for sin even when the blame for it should be on Eve. Let’s look at what happened in Genesis 3: 1-7; we read, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God really say, You must not eat from any tree in the garden?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Notice first that the serpent could speak and not until later had legs and could walk. The serpent says to Eve, not Adam, and he lies to her. What is it that finally sells Eve to eat the forbidden fruit but the desire to be like God? She wanted more than her present condition; she wanted to be a God, the first sin of self-idolatry. Every day, we see this very same desire wanting more than you have and being great and powerful without being grateful for what you have. Since that very day, women have always sought the better provider. She eats first and now gives it to Adam, who is standing by. Adam’s mistake first is not rebuking the serpent. Instead, he quietly listens to the conversation. He also fails to ask, how do we know she won’t die, perhaps he does not know to ask the question. However, he still had the option to say no. Adam’s sin is weakness and failing to stop his wife from disobeying. Some theologians even suggest that the serpent had sex with Eve, further suggesting Adam’s cowardice and comparing it to women today who have sex while their weak husbands watch.
Today we see the constant emasculation of man by the serpent spirit to put the female children of Eve in the same dominant role that caused the fall. Adam was responsible for Eve. God had placed him in the garden to take care of it. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” (Genesis 2:15) Therefore he was to take care of Eve as well but he failed. Contrary to what the liberal left would like us to believe that masculinity is no good. The proper rule is for masculinity to prevent evil and protect people from it and not to submit to it. As a result, Adam is blamed for the fall of mankind and not Eve who was both seduced to disobey and became the seducer to cause Adam to disobey. I am sure she said to Adam after eating, “See I didn’t die!”
You put a live lobster in cold water and it thinks it is safe then you slowly turn the heat on and it never realizes that it is slowly being cooked until it is too late and dies. The same is true with freedom. You take a little bit at a time until you have none and then it is too late. America is becoming a one-party communistic nation and you don’t even see it. Propaganda media, fraud elections, forced separation by distancing, and vaccination to determine who can work and who cannot. Defunding police so that crimes increases and then the military well be moved in for order and control and slowing you are losing your freedom. Now the fact-checkers and some of you will say I am promoting the conspiracy theory. However, if you read the Book of Revelation and remember the comment by a former President Bush stating we were entering into a One World Order you would realize we are moving in that direction. Your cell phone can show your every movement. Social media monitors everything you say, what you buy etc. You are already being watched.
If you use Google maps to locate your home you can see a picture of your house. Now if the government wants to it can view who is coming and going. You cannot end up in FB jail if they are not monitoring what you are writing. They know who your family and friends are. Where you go and when. Someone can easily access your page and get information to use to scam you or to simply know your activity. This is true about all social media sites. Don’t be naive in thinking that they don’t sell your information.
Your smartphone and late model cars have a GPS system in them and you use it for directions. While you are driving and when you make the wrong turn the GPS instantly reroutes the program. To do that the system has to know where your car is at the moment. So the police for example don’t need to follow you. The GPS system can tell them where you stopped. They just need to have access. A time is coming when the military will enforce government laws. They will have access to all the means of tracking your location, and all of your activity. Covid has already begun to control the movement of the population.
The government has already started to control the movement, sitting, and rituals conducted in church. People have now become so indoctrinated that a germ is more powerful than God. The government has now crossed the line between Church and State. It leads to the issue that God does not keep you healthy but the government does, resulting in there being really no God. When Christians receive the Eucharist wearing a mask before and after taking the body of Christ. They have lost faith in the Eucharist. There are those that already disbelieve in the Eucharist therefore the government has succeeded in removing a belief in a God that protects and heals. You are then a slave to the government. WAKE UP!
When we stop thinking along the lines of some particular religious group of believers, we never hear of the Bible read like any other book, from beginning to end telling a single story in the form of a saga. A saga is generally a long story with a series of smaller stories, for example, the Game of Thrones or the Lord of the Rings, to name two. The Bible is also a saga. With 66 books that deal with the fall of man into sin and the resurrection of man through redemption. The particular genre is Dramatic Comedy since it begins in sorrow and ends in joy.
Now that we have established the Bible as a book telling a story, we can examine the Bible as a literary work with elements common to other literary stories. First, we shall look at all accounts, whether in written, theatre, or film form establishes a setting for the story. A tale about St. Patrick would take place in Ireland and the 5th century. Therefore, a story has a background, a time, and a place where the story takes place. In the movies, the first scene is that of a location, a shot of the Empire State Building to suggest New York City. The Bible does the very same thing. It tells us the story takes place near the Tigers and Euphrates rivers, the Red Sea, the Jordon River, and the Sea of Galilee. Therefore, the Bible account area is where those rivers flow and the locations of those seas. The general site for the saga is from the Eastern portion of Egypt through Israel north to Turkey and west to include Jordon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. In the Bible, this area would become known as Babylon. The only time this changes is when we read about Paul and Peter traveling through the Roman Empire and dying in Rome.
The Bible also deals with how the people and the area change during the long period of the saga. First is a period before the flood. Next is the period after the flood and the period of slavery through conquest and destruction. We read the arrival and rejection of the Messiah, and finally, the Bible ends with Israel’s return and the building of the Third Temple and the return of the Messiah and God’s throne on earth. All of these various periods that place in the same area with the same people. Since the people in the saga are from the same bloodline, they are the survivors of the flood of the descendants of Shem, the patriarch of Abraham, the patriarch Jacob, the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. The twelve tribes of Israel and the tribe of Judah becoming the focus in the final chapters provides the reader of the Biblical saga with the protagonist-main character of the Biblical tale. The book of Revelation speaks of two prophets speaking in Israel in the final days. Therefore from beginning to end, the main character is always the nation of Israel.
Throughout the Bible story, the people of Israel no sooner are taken out of slavery by the Lord God turn and build an idol to worship. Time and time again, they turn their back on God. In the end, before the return of Jesus, they will worship a false messiah who will proclaim to be God in the final Temple. Some of those who claim to be Jewish are like Hamlet having a tragic ending, while those who accept Jesus Christ experience the joy of being together in a New Jerusalem with God.
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Many people seem to think when they die there soul goes somewhere but this is a big mistake since the word soul is miss understood. The English translation of Hebrew is misleading when it comes to the word ‘soul.’ When I pointed this out to some friends at a Bible Study they nearly freaked out. Now during the reformation, the Catholic Church forbids individuals from translating the Bible. Here would be an example of why. The Hebrew word for soul is נֶ֫פֶשׁ, nephesh, although translated as “soul” in some older English Bibles, actually has a meaning closer to “living being”. Nephesh was rendered in the Septuagint as ψυχή (psūchê), the Greek word for soul. It is not a spirit. So when you die the “living being” is now dead.
Ecclesiastes 3:18-20 New International Version (NIV)
18 “I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. 19 Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. 20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”
Nephesh (נֶ֫פֶשׁ nép̄eš) is a Biblical Hebrew word which occurs in the Hebrew Bible. The word refers to the aspects of sentience, and human beings and other animals are both described as having nephesh. Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that require respect and care.
Plants, as an example of live organisms, are not referred to in the Bible as having nephesh. The term נפש is literally “soul”, although it is commonly rendered as “life” in English translations. One view is that nephesh relates to sentient beings without the idea of life and that, rather than having a nephesh, a sentient creation of God is a nephesh. InGenesis 2:7 the text is that Adam was not given a nephesh but “became a living nephesh.” Nephesh then is better understood as a person, seeing that Leviticus 21:11 and Numbers 6:6 speak of a “dead body”, which in Hebrew is a nép̄eš mêṯ, a dead nephesh. Nephesh, when put with another word, can detail aspects related to the concept of nephesh; with רוּחַ rûach (“spirit”) it describes a part of mankind that is immaterial, like one’s mind, emotions, will, intellect, personality, and conscience, as in Job 7:11. As you can see it has nothing to do with the misconception of an immortal spirit. Only Jesus can give you eternal life.
Nearly Three thousand years ago King Solomon made an observation of the people of his day and that very same thing is still happening today. The Wisdom of Solomon Chapter 2.
Dr. Anthony Raimondo 