This is part of a series. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, and part 6. Note: links will go live upon publication.
Today’s constructive criticism pertains to the reading and use of scripture.
I live alone in a rural area far from the crowds, by choice. But I’ve never felt lonely or alone in my life. Sometimes I might suspect that very few people understand my situation, but I know that God does. Nor does it matter if any others understand. I remain cognizant that there is a great cloud of witnesses watching me. (Hebrews 12:1) And I’d like to imagine I might be on some government watchlist too. 
In my opinion, loneliness is the harmful delusion of people who ignore the presences of all those whom we have been told and know by faith are watching us.
The silly field of psychology might say that I have retained an “imaginary audience” and that my “personal fable” is intact and robust. But I don’t hold to those fools’ faithless thinking, which contradicts what all-knowing God tells us about ourselves. Those eternal fools either fail to comprehend or choose to willfully ignore that they are constantly being watched and recorded and that they will face judgement for their every word and deed.
Furthermore, they then teach their childish ignorance of the invisible to others. They’re cosmically retarded! Refusing to conceptualize and remain aware of powers and beings they cannot see. Their mental and spiritual intellect is much like that of a goldfish. Upon turning away from God’s scriptural looking glass those souls are immediately unable to recollect what sort of creature they are, and all the inherent duties incumbent upon their kind. (James 1:23-24)
Death Is Sleep
The New Testament is full of references to what happens after a person dies: they are asleep in the grave. Here is a list of New Testament speakers and writers who testified to this very thing:
- Jesus/Matthew (Matthew 9:24)
- Jesus/Mark (Mark 5:39)
- Jesus/Luke (Luke 8:52-53)
- Jesus/John (John 11:11-14)
- Luke (Acts 7:59-60)
- Paul (Ephesians 5:14; 1 Corinthians 11:30,15:6,18-20; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14,5:9-10)
- Peter (2 Peter 3:4)
Death is described as sleep because it is the temporary state prior to resurrection and eternal life that takes place on the Final Day of Judgment.
The Old Testament also refers to the grave—”Sheol”—as a place of unconsciousness. It’s the same thing.
The reason that Roman Catholic prayers for the dead are invalid is because the dead are asleep. They cannot hear, nor can they intercede. There are no saints consciously watching over us. So when Sharkly says…
…this immediately raises red flags. After all, Sharkly doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of prayers for the dead—despite his citations of the Deuterocanonicals—so how can he claim that the dead are watching us?
Let’s see what scripture says, to see if it conforms to Sharkly’s claim.
We need to remember (as we stated in “Ambiguity in the Bible“) that the idea of going to heaven immediately upon death—rather than awaiting the resurrection of the body—is derived from translators inserting a comma into the text:
Luke 23:43b can be translated in two ways:
Truly I tell you,
today you will be with me in paradise.
…and…
Truly I tell you today,
you will be with me in paradise.
As we noted there, punctuation is not part of inspired scripture. (Not to mention that heaven and paradise are different concepts, per 2 Corinthians 12:4.)
When one dies, one enters an unconscious, dreamless state. Because there is no sense of the passage of time, when a person dies, the next moment of consciousness will be on the Day of Judgment when the dead shall rise. There will be no sense of delay or waiting, for the dead have no sense of such things. Only from our standpoint, within the bounds of time, do the dead ‘wait.’
Now, let’s look at the passage in Hebrews that Sharkly cited:
Therefore, seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us also run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the leader and finisher of our trust, who, because of the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, thinking nothing of the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
While we all agree that this refers to those who have died, we do not all agree that they are watching. The verse does not use any language that implies that they are watching. Sharkly has added this in.
The dead do not watch us.
Witnesses
In “Constructive Criticism, Part 1” we discussed Sharkly’s stance on church discipline. There we noted that in order to bring a charge of sin against a brother, you must first establish it as truth on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Sharkly disregarded this requirement. So, it is no wonder that Sharkly does not understand what the proper role of a witness is in biblical terminology.
Recently, Sharkly made this comment lecturing readers about how superior he was at explaining the Bible on his site from the original words of scripture using interlinear translations on biblehub.com. So let’s look at the Hebrews 12:1 interlinear here…
…and the Matthew 18:16 interlinear here:
Do you see that? The word for the witnesses specified in the Matthew 18 protocol for church discipline is the same word as the cloud of witnesses. What does the word martus (from which we get our word martyr) mean?
Meaning: a witness; an eye- or ear-witness.
Word Origin: Derived from the base of G3144 (μάρτυς), related to the concept of witnessing or testifying.
Usage: In the New Testament, “martus” primarily refers to a witness, someone who has firsthand knowledge or experience of an event or truth. It is used in both legal and spiritual contexts. Over time, the term evolved to include those who bear witness to their faith through suffering or death, hence the English word “martyr.”
Cultural and Historical Background: In the Greco-Roman world, a “martus” was someone who could provide testimony in a court of law. In the early Christian context, the term took on a deeper meaning as believers were often called to testify to their faith in Jesus Christ, sometimes at great personal cost. The early church revered those who remained steadfast in their testimony, even unto death, as martyrs.
Witnesses are those who give or have given legal testimony to establish a claim as being true.[1] The “great cloud of witnesses” are those who have died, having remained steadfast in their witness testimony during their life until the end of their life. Their legal testimony remains as the legally binding claim to the truth of faith in Jesus Christ.
The term has nothing to do with consciousness after death.
The witnesses are not watching over Sharkly. They represent the true testimony of those who came before him that faith in Jesus Christ is true. If he is to embrace that same faith, his faith is justified by what the previous cloud of witnesses have already legally established.
Remember when Sharkly wrote this?
Derek Ramsey is seemingly poor at differentiating what are literal commands, what are generalizations, and what are merely examples given in the Bible.
Sharkly has great difficulty distinguishing between literal and figurative language, and he projects that onto others. The “great cloud of witnesses” is not literally dead people surrounding us, it is their legacy—their testimony—that lives on after them. This is what commentaries teach. Ellicott’s Commentary makes it clear that the confusion stems from the English word, not the Greek:
There simply isn’t any ambiguity in the Greek, which makes Sharkly’s statement…
If people truly want to examine what I’ve written, they should read it at my site and check it against the original words of scripture that are made easy to explore at places like biblehub.com and Etc.
…doubly ironic.
Fables and Mysticism
It’s not the field of psychology that insists that Sharkly has an “imaginary audience” of his “personal fable.” It is the testimony of scripture. Despite this, Sharkly is quite willing to convert his mystical thinking into attacks against persons, calling them fools, faithless, delusional, and retarded.
Like his teaching on the Image of God, Sharkly’s theology is very nearly a novel invention held only by him. Sharkly provides a good example of why Christians are to be part of a body, to prevent them from going off the deep end. Recall what I noted in “Constructive Criticism, Part 2“:
Self-righteous individuals are characterized by their absolutely certainty and moral superiority. They believe that they are right and that anyone who disagrees is wrong by definition.
First, most self-righteous men refuse to engage in debate, as it serves no constructive purpose. They view debate as actively hostile to unity. They prefer merely to tell people what is or isn’t true. Sometimes these are the kind of men who like to censor, condemn people who want to debate ideas, or at least strongly try to minimize the role of debate to near irrelevance.
Second, other self-righteous men may choose to use a debate format as a platform to tell people what they must believe. These people take on the guise of objectivity, but their self-righteousness is revealed in that nothing that the opposing side presents can change their view. The purpose of debate is to use it as a platform for proselytizing. If it does not accomplish this goal, it may even be discarded.
Third, what about men who use debate but are not self-righteous? These men acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge and a lack of certitude. They see debate as the means of testing their own views, as with by fire, to see what remains. Because no man can be certain that he is correct, he must rely on others to find the errors in his reasoning. It is impossible for a self-righteous man to do this.
Sharkly’s comment above represents more of the first type: assertions without debate. He often avoids debate and rushes to judgment, all without the testimony of witnesses. He believes that he is right with complete and utter certainty, and he will shell out numerous insults and condemnation on anyone who disagrees with him, as he did again in his recent comment. The Matthew 18 protocol is design to prevent precisely this kind of person from doing the kind of damage that he could cause. That’s why witnesses are important.
None of the theology I express on this blog is established (in any legal sense) as truth without the corroborating testimony of witnesses. Unless fellow Christian witnesses agree, it remains merely opinion. Similarly, if I desire to attack a person rather than their idea, I am obligated to follow the Matthew 18 protocol regarding witness testimony.
Sharkly cares about none of this.
There really isn’t much more to say. I’ve explained why Sharkly is wrong. I’ve explained why Sharkly should stop being so judgmental and self-righteous (i.e. unfounded moral certainty). There is little else left to do, so I’ll just wrap it up here. I’d like for a better conclusion, but this is all we have.
Footnotes
[1] Strong’s lexicon gives one and only example of martus meaning spectator: Hebrews 12:1. Given what a lexicon is, anyone who cites this as an explanation for why Hebrews 12:1 refers to a spectator (rather than a witness giving testimony) is engaging in blatant circular reasoning.
Whenever Sharkly doesn’t know something like that there is a Power-Metal(think Meatloaf but with more intense opera-like lyrics, guitars, and drums w/o the pop overtones) band named MANOWAR(”I just realized the other night that MANOWAR is a real band”
or what he told Eternitymatters=EM later ”This same person initially contacted me privately via email, after claiming to have done the same to Derek Ramsey, we conversed quite a bit, and I did my best to communicate with them, but alas much of their conversation was nonsensical gibberish. I tried to explain to this person that I could not understand their gibberish, but they acted as if they believed it was truly impossible that I was not able to understand the nonsense they strung together. Eventually I figured out they were just playing upon my desire to be helpful, and were only wasting my time(after he left my sites on November 30, 2021, and I wanted revenge that is).”-any of that sound familiar to what Sharkly says at this blog?)
he thinks you’re trying to trick him or as he/she/it more eloquently tells it ‘’DAbluepill twicked me into sinning against DALAWD, my sons and my wife & the holy order of Patriarchy.’’
IOW?
He’s(”his” preferred pronoun) a ‘’TRUE BELIEVER’’ in whatever rightwing liberal delusions that he/she/it thinks will make him/she/it ‘’popular’’ with the rightwing liberal mob.
In the end, when you talk to Sharkly you’re basically talking to the wall or whatever rightwing liberal delusions he/she/it is currently popular with the rightwing liberal mob at the moment.
i do wonder if he/she/it thinks Trump was ”twicked” by George Soros here:
”Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent becomes highest-ranking out gay person in US history
Donald Trump’s gay nominee for secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina with his husband and family, is the first Senate-approved LGBTQ+ member in a Republican cabinet.
In November 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to be secretary of the Treasury, after he helped raise millions of dollars for Trump.
In a statement posted on Truth Social at the time, Trump praised Bessent as “one of the world’s foremost international investors and geopolitical and economic strategists”, adding: “Scott’s story is that of the American Dream… together, we will make America rich again, prosperous again [and] affordable again.”
According to Forbes, the “pro-tariff Wall Street veteran” and former colleague of Democratic megadonor George Soros is likely to become the most prominent voice shaping the Trump economy.”
assertions without debate. He often avoids debate and rushes to judgment, all without the testimony of witnesses. He believes that he is right with complete and utter certainty, and he will shell out numerous insults and condemnation on anyone who disagrees with him, as he did again in his recent comment
He would just pretend it’s NOT TRUE that the guy he thinks is going to repeal the 19th Amendment and start slinging numerous insults and condemnation on anyone who brings up the reality of Trump, Scott Bessent, and George Soros with him.
Remember this is the same guy who was living a lie of a happy marriage to his family, Church, and Community for some 15-plus years instead of admitting he was failing with his wife then comes the divorce papers and Sharkly falls apart like a delicate flower, and starts looking for ”evidence ”it wasn’t any of his fault(he admits right after the wedding she said ”NO S*X!!!”-so why didn’t he get the Marriage annulled before any intercourse had bounded them? and before he brought any children into such a mess?-WHY???-here:”He’s(”his” preferred pronoun) a ‘’TRUE BELIEVER’’ in whatever rightwing liberal delusions that he/she/it thinks will make him/she/it ‘’popular’’ with the rightwing liberal mob”) which brings him to the Dalrock blog specifically the posts on that sappy and lifetimeTV-esque FireProof film from ’08(the DAL’ posts are from 2011/2).
Sharkly claims he wants to get remarried (& it fails and he starts blaming the ”RP” Church instead of the BP Church) he might need this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBEqZDtOnkA
Following Red Pill Nonsense Got Me Dumped in Taiwan!
Coach Corey Jack Wayne
Remember Sparkly like your idol Republicans say ”Strong MENZ blame themselves & take responsibilities and accountability, weak MENZ blame others that are GREATER than them( main current examples for weak-willed easily twicked ”RP Geniuses” being MOSES, JESUS, GBFM, MOD & Derek)”
P.S.Sparkly you will especially need that when you fail again with women and need to find ”evidence” of how it wasn’t your fault but a bluepill-feminist-Patriarchal-churchian conspiracy like last time with your ex-wife as you blame Coach Corey Jack Wayne, DAL’, Matt Perkins & ”RP” MOSES AND JESUS.
More help for Sharkly-this time on business:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2fHbbOmu_o
213,248 views Jan 28, 2025
This is the untold story of Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. How did he actually make his money? Was he poor, selling how to become rich? Was it all a lie? Who made Robert? Was Poor Dad rich? Who was rich dad’s daddy? Why does Robert say he became a Beta? Who actually wrote the book Rich Dad Poor Dad? What do the hidden camera investigations show?
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:44 Hidden Camera Investigation
02:21 Second Investigation
03:48 Who was Poor Dad?
06:40 First ex-wife
08:13 Millionaire lie?
09:24 Poor dad’s rich?
10:55 Real estate rich?
12:03 1985 homeless millionaire?
15:48 She made Robert
17:13 Scary investigation
18:49 PROOF
20:05 Disturbing past
23:16 Fake dad?
24:45 Was rich dad real?
26:27 Rich Dad’s Daddy
28:21 Crook Dad
32:34 Who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad?
35:19 Pyramid Scheme
39:13 Real founder sues
41:00 Robert didn’t pay
44:16 Robert became BETA(with Rich Cooper interviewing him)
This parallels Sparklys millionaire life in that he blames the destruction on his ex-wife (instead of being a REAL MENZ who takes responsibility, accountability, and leadership over it)who twicked his investors=partners by saying he was bad:
”My wife’s public badmouthing of me seemed to go into high gear with people she thought might have some influence over me. She badmouthed me to my business’ first investor and his wife, Pam balled her eyes out and slandered me at a formal dinner we had been invited to at their house, and the angel investor ended up welching on his deal and pulling out of the project then. I was left without an income and having to fund the entire business out of savings and debt for six months until I could get new financing lined up. I didn’t let her have contact with my new investors, so she began badmouthing me to my business partners. One even begged me to get her to stop it, because it was demotivating to work for a man he believed in, and needed to believe in, and then to have my wife frequently call him and trash me. However, eventually my business partners saw an opportunity and with Pam’s help and concurrence they tried to oust me out of the business I had founded and brought them into. I told my partners not to take their power struggle to our investors to try to get them against me also, but they foolishly did, and as a result those investors got scared the business might not survive with a power struggle going on, and got in a race to see who could seize and liquidate our assets first, because there was an economic downturn affecting their own businesses, and they wanted to get cash out. We had just achieved profitability. But with the hostile liquidation my 5 Million dollars of stock became worth zero overnight. I shouldn’t have to find myself asking how large of a part did my wife’s working completely against me contribute to my complete economic destruction. If I even mention her subversive part in destroying my business she howls that I’m an irresponsible person trying to blame my own failure on her.
Needless to say, after I was financially devastated, she got extremely evil to me.”
Well, that was a crazy video.
Hilarious how Coach Corey Wayne talks about men being physically fit. From a dude with a “who farted” look on his face and the body type of VP candidate of Tim Walz.
In the 1980’s Regan’s Surgeon General was talking about how “Americans are very overweight” and when you looked at him. He could have shed a good 60-80 pounds and still would have been a rotund guy.