listen...

Dad: Here's this.

Josh: You're wrapping it up, huh?

Mom: Okay, this is a one and one half hour Search for Truth, your dad's testimony video.

Josh: We'll spread that around too, don't worry.

Mom: No, it would be nice to get that one back.

Josh: I mean we'll spread that message around.

Mom: Oh.

Josh: We'll get the word out. I assume you said what you meant to say when you said it.

Dad: Me?

Josh: Yeah.

Dad: Oh, yeah. The previous speaker, or the previous couple speakers, or something, said everything I was going to say, so I was, I didn't want to say the same thing that the other people had just said.

Mom: So you went into your testimony then.

Dad: Yeah, that's what I did.(laughing)

Mom: Ah.

Dad: Yeah, I just winged it.

Mom: Wow, okay.

Josh: Of course I'm going to have to deconstruct everything that you say, and understand it for what it really is.

[... A new direction...]

It was -- was that when we severed Joshua from our family, 'cause that was '88? We got him back. It was in '88 that we severed our son. You know when you have cancer and you're not doing a natural treatment, the treatment for the cancer is to cut it off, cut it out, throw it away. Well, we, within our family, on the Day of Atonement, before June of '88 you said? '87, before June of '87, on the Day of Atonement then in '86, I told the family, things have to change or else we might have to separate. And basically we had a child that was a problem child. Perhaps in family dynamics, you can't point to just one person and say it's your fault.

But the four of us just didn't, there wasn't anything we could do, that we knew to do that would help him. In order for the family to survive -- Margaret and myself and our other son Caleb. Come June of that year we had to put him out, our 13-year-old son, in order for the rest of us to to be able to survive. So then we became involved in the juvenile authorities and with the Division of Family Services, and we started a new learning experience. And over the next three years my sister and brother-and-law had custody of our son, and for a couple of those years we were trying with the Division of Family Services and family counseling with a Seventh-Day Adventist family therapist to reunite our family, with the help of a professional's intervention.

But the government authorities and my sister and brother-in-law had a conspiracy to keep us apart, and that we weren't going to get back together. After three years -- my son was sixteen at the time -- he had succeeded in destroying their family. It was just my sister and brother-in-law --they didn't have any children -- they managed with him for three years, and then the state took him out of their family and just gave him back to us, just dumped him in our lap with four hours notice or something and said, "Manage him the best way that you can until he turns 17, and then you can put him out on the street."

And if we couldn't manage him -- it was just a few months -- then he was going to go to the state hospital for maintenance, because there couldn't be anything else to do for him. So we didn't even make it the few months. Just two weeks before he turned 17, and we were planning on transfering him to a family who thought they could provide everything he needed,

The state intervened and my son, you know, did all these maneuvers. They took him away from us without due process of law, completely contrary to the statues and the state law and the constitutions and so forth. So we experienced first hand the tyranny and the powerful hand of the government, when they, you know, just reach into your home and just destroy your family.

We knew that whatever was happening to us wasn't right, but we weren't trained and knowlegable in how to prevent it from happening to us. So we became students of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the state laws and stuff. Because we realized that the authorities aren't going to follow the laws if they don't want to, and we found out that it happens all the time, not just to us but it happens to many other families.

So we became activists, in our own way, in trying to help protect the rights of families and parents with children and people that are oppressed and people that are suffering injustice. And actually what has happened -- we can look back now over the years and see --Yahweh has called us into a special ministry of being warriors for his work and his cause. And so we have kind of a special ministry now involving secular government and preserving religious freedom in a community, preserving life, preserving liberty and justice.

So I guess I can kind of stop here.

You've got the whole background now laid for the continuation of my study, and what I can share, what you can look forward to, is taking an analysis of the priciples of government that we can find from the Old Testament, how government is supposed to work according to the author of governments, the instigator of governments. And then we compare that, those principles, with the constitution and the way our government is supposed to be organized. And we compare the authority for men to be able to get together and form a government, like we have, with the authority that's given in the scriptures.

In the Declaration it declares certain rights to be self-evident and we compare the scriptures with that to see,and it refers to God's laws and nature's laws in the Declaration of Independence and we kind of look into that, and then follow that structure all the way down to Revelations chapter 13 and the imposition of the "mark of the beast," and the restrictions on our liberty to be able to buy or sell and how we as believers, the choices we are going to be able to have, when the oppressive laws are going to be imposed upon us.

So that's what I'd be looking forward to at a later time...

My emotional response:

listen...