HOLY LAND MINISTRY is a religious organization, an auxiliary of the Sacred Medical Order of the Knights of Hope. It boasts a 1,600 year heritage, dating back to the Tomb of Lazarus in Jerusalem 410 AD. The ministry was founded by HOLY LAND MAN, who was born not far from the birthplace of Jesus Christ, the place where Mohammed visited heaven,^[1] and where Moses brought the Ten Commandments from God.

Beliefs[edit]

The unique Ministry doctrine is true to the Word of God in its original language.^[2] The Ministry eliminated generations of self-interested misinterpretations. Synagogues, kings, imams, priests and other worldly interpretations are stripped down from the Bible. Religious organizations use God as a means to go to war and create a fear of hell and punishment.^[3] But the Ministry teaches that God’s words are beautiful and should not be attached to the ugly actions of mankind.

The Ministry is the only religious organization in the world that does not use the name of God in vain. Kings and popes have used the name of God to start wars. The crusades were wars started in the name of God to take over Jerusalem for themselves. People prayed to God for their king, their leader, to win. The Ministry teaches that God is great without the fear that other religious organizations instill in their images of Him. The Ministry does not use the name of God in vain, nor does it rely on idols, statues, or physical images of God. It maintains its beliefs in the purity of the Ten Commandments.

Holy Land Ministry and its founder, HOLY LAND MAN have amassed 1.5 million followers in the first few months of the Ministry’s introduction of its doctrine.

The teachings of the ministry emphasize the oneness, omniscience, and spirituality of God. The beliefs of this ministry are presented in eight pillars.

The Ministry's Doctrine[edit]

The eight pillars of the ministry are as follows:

1. There is only one God: "Hear, O Israel: our LORD is the one GOD (Deuteronomy 6:4)."
2. God is everywhere. God is part of each person.
   1. Members can talk to God, who is listening anytime & everywhere. They shall create a worship place and time for God within their home and themselves. They should not talk to God at scheduled times in a church, synagogue or mosque.

1. Members shall learn to inspire worship of God within themselves (meditation free of daily associations).
2. God has no definite image or statue. God should not be described in any picture or statue or image: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20 4-6).
3. The ten wishes of God (the Ten Commandments) must be obeyed like a wish of an intelligent parent

1. A relationship with God is like children with parents or between spouses which are based on love and the desire to please and protect. The ministry rejects the utilitarian belief that God is the master and men are his slaves.
2. God wants men to love "Reh" (|Hebrew: acquaintance, up to the circle of a friend of a friend) like they love and respect themselves: ”Thou shalt love thy acquaintance as thyself.” (Lev. 19:18)
3. The Bible is the Word of God. Any ulterior motive interpretation of it is in violation of God's wish, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy GOD in vain."
   1. Welcome: interpretations which are a pure interpretation of the Bible riddles are welcome. Adjustments to the progress of time.
   2. Prohibited: wars in the name of God, social statuses, scaring believers, using God's name for personal financial gain, etc.
4. God wants all entities (humans, animals, plants, ) to improve his blueprint genes (DNA).
5. Members must live a life of prayer.
6. Members must rely on monastic natural medicine.

1600 Years of the Ministry[edit]

Holy Land Ministry is a priory of the Sacred Medical Order, a family of churches that date back Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem hospital from the 5th century. They share a belief in the doctrine that natural remedy is designed by God and is, therefore, best for body, soul, and spirit.^[4]

Christian monasticism began in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. The Therapeutae were a Jewish sect of spiritual healers who became the first Christian monks. They are the forerunners and the models for the Christian practice of ascetic life.

The Therapeutae were renowned for both their asceticism and healing abilities. The English words “therapy” and “therapeutic” are etymologically connected to the name of this ancient religious Order, indicating that medicine, religion, and healing were deeply connected in the early Christian world, and healing was seen as religious art. What we know of the life of the Founder of Christianity and how much He did for the ailing poor would lead us to conclude that the religion that He established would foster the care and the cure of future suffering humanity.

The first works of Christian service were organized care for the sick. At first, a portion of the bishop’s house was given over to the shelter of the ailing, and a special order of assistants to the clergy, the deaconesses, took care of them. As Christians became more numerous, special hospitals were founded, and these became public institutions just as soon as freedom from persecution allowed Christians the liberty to give overt expression to their feelings for the poor.

While hospitals of limited capacity for such special purposes as the sheltering of slaves or soldiers and health establishments of various kinds for the wealthy had been erected before Christianity, this was the first time that anyone who was ill, no matter what the state of his pecuniary resources, could be sure to find shelter and care. The expression of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, that admission to these hospitals was not limited to Christians, is the best possible evidence of the liberal charity that inspired them. In the 4th century, A.D. Saint Anthony the Great was connected with the first Egyptian hermits. Meanwhile, Pachomius the Saint Pachomius was connected with the first communities of cenobites in Egypt.

Saint Fabiola was the first person to found a hospital, into which she might gather sufferers out of the streets, and where she nursed the unfortunate victims of sickness and want. A member of a wealthy Roman family, Fabiola became a Christian ascetic, selling all her belongings and founding the first hospital in the Western world as we know it today. Saint Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea, placed monasticism in an urban context by introducing charitable, medical service as a work discipline.

When St. Basil of Caesarea visited Egypt in 357 A.D., he was so impressed with these monastic medical provisions that he decided to take Christian charity further.^[5] He founded a gigantic hospital, some say comparable to the seven wonders of the ancient world, in his hometown of Caesarea in Cappadocia (modern east-central Turkey). It boasted a sophisticated health care system similar to that found in the Egyptian monasteries, i.e. the Therapeutae, but with the difference that free inpatient care, dispensed by physicians and nurses, was not mainly restricted to monks, but made available to the general public for the first time. Thus the first Christian hospital, inspired by Egyptian and Buddhist monastic traditions, was born to become a template for the many other hospitals which spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

Monastic medicine was developing during the middle ages and was provided as part of religious duty, with payments and income made through a church rather than directly to the monk. The Rule of St. Benedict states that “before and above all things, care must be taken of the sick, that they are served in the very truth as Christ is served.” Virtually every monastery had an infirmary for the monks or nuns, and this led to provision being made for the care of laity and secular patients. Almost half of the hospitals in medieval Europe were directly affiliated with monasteries, priories of the many Order of Knightly Orders (Hospitaller and Teutonic) or other religious institutions and hospices.

This early Christian and medieval age is probably the most difficult period of medical history to understand properly, but it is worthwhile taking the time to follow the thread of medical tradition from the Greeks to the Jews, Christians, and Arabs, and how the Renaissance medical writers began modern medicine as we now know it today. History records that the first hospitals were Christian, and is a conspicuous mark upon the landscape of humanity.

Historical records are rich with medical practices, discoveries and healing traditions from diverse civilizations, including the Greeks, the Romans, the Essenes, and their healing order called the Therapeutae, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Hindus, and the Native Americans, to name just a few. These cultures even produced some healing temples, spas, and clinics. But the record of antiquity prior to and apart from the influence of Christianity is astonishingly vacant when it comes to the hospital as we know it today.

The first Christian physicians came mainly from Syria, as might be expected, for here the old Greek medical traditions were active. Among them must be enumerated Cosmas and Damian, physicians who were martyred by the persecution of Roman Emperor Diocletian (244-311), and who have been chosen as the patrons of the medical profession. Justinian erected a famous church to them. It became the scene of pilgrimages. Organizations of various kinds since, as the College of St. Come, and medical societies have been named after them.

Distinguished Christian writers and scholars, and the Fathers of the Church in the early centuries paid much attention to medical care. Tertullian speaks of medicine as the sister of philosophy and has many references to the medical doctrines discussed in his time. Thus we come to the word in use around 1225, fisicien, from Old French to physician, from fisique “art of healing,” from Latin physica – “natural science.” In monastic medicine, diagnosis and the taxonomy of illness were central.

Diagnosis in the medieval literature was called discernment (diakrisis). Discernment was to differentiate an illness caused by demons or one caused by natural elements. Discernment also was important to identify malingers who would pretend illness in order to receive food and shelter.

Non-medical treatment was also central to monastic medical practice and enjoyed a venerable history in early Christian practice. Non-medical healing employed a number of therapies – prayer, invocation of the name Jesus, laying of the hands, application of holy oils and waters, and even exorcism. For a monk’s ability to heal by non-medical means was considered a gift and was to be developed by ascetic practice and study of nature.

The monastic medical system represented a transitional period in the history of medicine during which natural, physical medicine and principles of spiritual healing uniquely coexisted. One of the most significant contributions of the monastic community to the field of medical knowledge was its role in copying manuscripts. Physicians were trained primarily through Latin texts and, in a culture where few people could read or write, the monks served as propagators of knowledge, the Knights protected the monasteries. The ability to practice physical medicine in this religious context was based on the subordination of this practice to the predominant realm of spiritual belief and was fostered by the doctrine that the effectiveness of physical medicine was possible only because of this spiritual association and the religious base for physical treatments.

Rev. John Wesley (1704-1791) was the eighteenth-century English clergyman who helped to pioneer the transition of monastic medicine to ‘clerical medicine’ and applied the use of electricity for the treatment of illness. Wesley considered it a Christian duty to make medical knowledge and practical treatments accessible to the ‘Majority of Mankind’ a necessary and important aspect also of pastoral duties, just as the Knights of centuries past. Drawing from contemporary advice on healthy living and nature cures for disease with particular influence from Dr. George Cheyne’s – An Essay of Health and Long Life (London, 1724).^[6] Wesley published a low-cost and easy-to-read medical handbook entitled Primitive Physic: an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases.^[7]

Of all the nature cures that sprang from monastic medicine, the most renowned was the one initiated by the Bavarian pastor, Father Sebastian Kneipp, whose influence survives into this age of antibiotics. Father Kneipp had his interest kindled in youth by a chance reading of a hydropathist manual. Thereafter in every parish to which he was sent, Father Kneipp practiced the water cure, as modified by himself.^[8] In 1854 he became known as the ‘cholera vicar’ as a result of saving many lives in a village epidemic.

The curious interest of medical history of the new colonies and many former worthies are quite unfamiliar to those who cherish the past accomplishments of our profession in the United States. There was a class of eminent practitioners, flourishing chiefly in the seventeenth century, who have been slighted by the few textbooks of the legion. I refer to the clerical physicians, who were mostly to be found in New England after the decline of monastic medicine in England. Some of these have no memorial, yet there are others of them who “have left a name behind them that their praises might be reported,” though, in many instances, their records are quite fragmentary. In this latter group, the name of Dr. Gershom Bulkeley is recorded and various estimates are given of his character.

Dr. Jared Eliot, the father of the regular practice in this State, was a son of the minister of Guilford, and grandson of the apostle, John Eliot. He graduated at Yale College in 1705. He was assisted and succeeded by his pupil and son-in-law, Dr. Benjamin Gale, who graduated at Yale in 1733, making that place for three-quarters of a century a great resort for medical instruction, equal in importance for that period to any of the cities for the present day.

All the sons of the clerical physicians who studied a profession took to medicine; but not one, unfortunately, went into Christ’s ministry. The members of the Ministry are a group of Knights from various denominational backgrounds, who feel called to this ministry of healing. They consider themselves to be the only surviving protectorates of monastic medicine as part of Christian nature cure. Many of them are involved in pastoral care; several of them are involved in interdenominational work; many of them are involved in equipping our own churches for the healing ministry; all of them are involved in personal ministry.^[9]

Ancient Monastic Medicine[edit]

Health sovereignty is generally considered to be the exercise of a secular state’s sovereign power to protect and promote health and provide health services. A sovereign state is classically defined as a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external authority and police power over its citizens. Few people realize that there is also the ecclesiastical state, a form of religious government in which the official policy is to be governed by divine guidance from officials who are pursuant to the doctrine of Christ as a religious Order. Thus became the doctrine – separation of Church and State. We invoke protections for our Church, Religion, Culture, traditional medicines and foods, and members in general under international laws, protection of human rights, and preservation of a cultural heritage. These are assured in international law.^[10]

The sacred religious Orders were a millennium long lineage of a tradition of monks, physicians and nurses (Hospitallers) who lived apart from society in accordance with their specific religious devotion and worship – that of medical care for the poor and needy, and defense of the Christian culture and faith. This thousand-year period of holiness mentioned in Book of Revelation 20, during which Jesus and his faithful followers are to rule on earth continues into the 21st century. This Order is a modern continuance and is composed of initiates (laity), communicants, citizens of Christendom, postulants, members of vocation, and ordained clergy. Members strive to achieve a common purpose through formally dedicating their life to God’s medicines and Christ’s gospel to help and heal.

This active Sacred Medical Order is the last such organization, carrying on the work of monastic medicine known as today’s nature cure, and we wish to have it preserved for the benefit of future generations as well as serve a lasting memory of a movement that contributed significantly to the Renaissance of today’s modern medicine. This heritage included languages, transcription, folk tales, ceremonies, modalities, etc. about traditional medicine, and all the medical and nursing skills that were handed down from generation to generation including surgery and ambulatory care in Christendom. These traditions and practices reflect the spirit of members and communities of the Hospitallers from Europe to the Americas, to the Philippines.^[11]

Monastic Medicine[edit]

The New Thought movements promote the idea that "Infinite Intelligence" or "God" is ubiquitous, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect. Hope is an essential and fundamental element of Christian life, so essential indeed, that, like faith and love, it can itself designate the essence of Christianity. This restoration of health is part of what is meant by the ‘abundant life’ which the Lord promised.

The ministry finds the elements of nature cure, new thought, and Medicine of Hope provide the three pillars of effective primary medical care which can be delivered world wide to the poor and needy at least expenses. Nature cure nurtures the physical body, New Thought the mental body, and Hope the Spirit. Our physical pillar are inexpensive medicines that can manage epidemic and fatal diseases affecting the planet today.

The medieval monastic medical system represented a transitional period in the history of medicine during which natural, physical medicine of Hippocrates and principles of spiritual healing of our Lord uniquely coexisted in Christian culture. The story of the Church throughout its history has been instrumental with the history of hospitals and caring for the sick as this book points out. The monks, Hospitallers, Methodists, and other church communities’ concern for the sick and dying elevated the professional and social status of the physician and nurse.

The Bible contains imperatives to care for those who suffer and provides hope for something far better than merely the restoration of bodily function or a new drug or nostrum to relieve symptoms. If Christian physicians, nurses, and other providers are to be alternatives in the medical community they must constantly be aware of the sin and sickness connection as well as natural causes and treatment. They must also advance those "certain cures" and "tried remedies" as testament to our cause.

Sickness is the shadow of death, a reminder of the horrible consequences of humanity’s rebellion against God. Each illness reminds men of their ultimate mortality (Hebrews 9:27). In this sense, almost every illness has a theological dimension for all Christians as well as those religious. It is a spiritual issue, one where not only the physician but also the patient, pastor, educator and counselor have legitimate roles. Spiritual and mental issues should not take a secondary aspect to physical ones.

Traditional medical practices are beginning to resurface in Africa. The ganoderma mushroom is one example of the growing interest in just about every African country in traditional medicine. Throughout the continent, scientists are studying ancient plants and herbs. The aim is to try and reestablish traditional medicine as an integral part of the primary health care system.

Between 600 and 700 Ghanaian physicians, for example, are practicing in the U.S. alone. That’s half the total population of doctors remaining in Ghana. An estimated 10,000 Nigerian academics now work in America. Between 1980 and 1991, only 39 percent of Ethiopian students returned from studies abroad out of 22,700 who left.

“Africa must return to traditional medicine,” says Dr. Ragasian Mahunnah, with the Institute of Traditional Medicine in Tanzania. “The key to health care in Africa is to be more preventive, because most Africans, once they get sick, can’t afford to treat diseases in the Western ways. We can’t afford the machines, or the drugs, or the Western trained physicians who know how to use them.”

Compared to the science in Asia, Latin America, Europe, the U.S., and especially China, research in traditional medicine in Africa lags far behind. Dr. Mahunnah says the main reason for this is colonialism. “When the colonists came, they suppressed the traditional medicine system. It was seen as something evil—voodoo or witchcraft. The colonists used force in suppressing traditional medicines. People were killed in public for using them.”

The focus on traditional medicine in Africa today is on taking an inventory of the customs and traditions all across the continent. The African Union (AU) has a scientific technical committee on traditional medicine consisting of medical doctors, botanists, pharmacologists, chemists and traditional healers who do ethno-botanical surveys. So far, in 19 countries, plants are being collected and identified and compiled into an ethno-pharmacopeia for each particular nation.

Fortunately, unlike many industrialized countries, African governments are finally striving to institutionalize traditional medicine. Even in South Africa, where Western medicine is very advanced, the very country which inaugurated heart transplants, traditional medicine is being rediscovered as a method of primary health care in a nation where, like much of Africa, Western methods are too expensive to be practical for many people.

Until the advent of synthetic pharmaceuticals after World War II, many doctors attempted to enhance what occurs in nature. It fostered the tendency of wounds to heal, the bowels to evacuate, and of bacteria to be overcome by natural immunity. Now medicine tries to engineer the very genetics that has allowed man/woman to evolve, survive and persist since the beginning of our time. Synthetic drugs are used to reduce blood pressure and production of cholesterol. Oral contraceptives are prescribed to prevent a normal occurrence of fertility in healthy persons. Unnatural therapies induce the organism to interact with chemicals or machines in ways where there is no precedent in evolution or nature. Organ and tissue grafts involve the outright obliteration of genetically programmed immunological defenses.

Technological medicine has become a domineering, monopolistic enterprise. In its war against suffering, it deems that all disease is unnecessary but profitable. Disease is no longer the body’s attempt to self-heal, no longer the infliction of previous sin, no longer a natural survival mechanism due to unseen forces. Disease in the biomedical model which can be fixed with biomolecules called new drugs. Inherited illnesses are considered simply damaged, genetic biomolecules which some day will be fixed through biological experimentation and intervention with nature. Secular medicine externalizes the illness from self. Disease is now caused external to self, for which the individual has no control and least responsibility.

Modern Medicine[edit]

Modern medicine actually serves as a religious function for modern medicine, as a spiritual conduit through which its science can be applied directly to the human body. No practicing doctor can deny the power in faith to restore function, even if healing is attributed to an oversimplified placebo effect. Rather than seeking to increasingly secularize medicine, physicians should strive to use its religious features to offer hope and healing to the sick, in keeping with its historically religious legacy. Christianity has contributed to these values by building upon the contributions of the ancient Greeks, bringing forward shifts in both realms—scientific and moral—that have created the paradigm in which modern medicine should exist. The persisting religious values and assumptions in medicine provide a practical example of the secularization thesis applied and failed to overcome; they illustrate how a “scientific” discipline is inextricably bound to religion, both historically and in contemporary expectations. These foundations have never gone away; religious assumptions remain crucial for the scientific and moral capacities of the modern doctor. Medicine provides an applied science to evaluate the role of religion in today’s pluralistic and secularized society.

The Apothecary has its organs in spice and spice trading and thus the importance of this long chapter of history. The word 'apothecary' is derived from apotheca, a "storehouse," meaning a place where wine, spices and herbs were stored. In London its origins dated back to the Guild of Pepperers founded in 1180. By 1316, the Pepperers had joined the Spicers. The Pepperers subsequently became wholesale merchant traders dealing en gros (hence the word 'grocer') and in 1428 were incorporated as the Worshipful Company of Grocers. The trade in spicery and the development of pharmacy became interdependent and led to the emergence of spicer-apothecaries.

The Bible uses the word perfumer rather than apothecary as in to prepare spices, or a compound of spices. From the perspective of Bible history, an apothecary was someone who mostly prepared the holy anointing oils and incense. Moses, along with all of his other responsibilities, was an apothecary, or a supervisor of apothecaries.

Heritage and History[edit]

When Christ sent out the twelve disciples on their first missionary tour, He bade them, “As ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.” Matthew 10:7, 8.

The United Kingdom is the home of the Magna Carta, one of the foundations for the world’s understanding of rights, including religious rights. Tracing the heritage of religious liberty takes us back more than 800 years to Magna Carta in 1215. At that time, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were separate nations; it was long before Great Britain was created, let alone the United Kingdom.

There are seven fundamental aspects of freedom of religion

• Freedom to read the Bible in public (achieved 1537)
• Freedom to interpret the Bible without government interference (achieved 1559)
• Freedom of worship (achieved 1689)
• Freedom to choose, or change your faith or belief (achieved 1689)
• Freedom to preach and try to convince others of the truth of your beliefs (achieved 1812)
• Freedom to build churches and other places of worship (achieved 1812), and
• Freedom from being required to affirm a particular worldview or set of beliefs in order to hold a public sector job or stand for election, work in professions such as teaching and law, or study at university (achieved by the repeal of various Test Acts between 1719 and 1888)

Traditional Hierarchical Structure[edit]

The Ministry is organized under the Florida State Non-Profit Corporations Act as a Church, designated by the IRS as a 508(c)(1)(a). It has a board of directors to manage its worldly affairs.

Founder[edit]

HOLY LAND MAN is a man who has done everything he can to help people and to change lives. He was born in the Holy Land in 1964 in a Holocaust surviving family.

He came to the United States of America thirty years ago. He has tried to help the American people by exposing the truth about the health and weight loss industry.

He invented a system that helped to change the lives of thousands of people. HOLY LAND MAN has actively combated the obesity epidemic in the United States and helped people to discover an alternative route to invasive surgery. He provided a support group, the world’s largest Facebook weight loss group, so that people might find the encouragement they need while losing weight.

Social issues[edit]

Holy Land Ministry promotes ten social issues amongst its members:

1. Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and is a fundamental human right. Attaining the highest possible level of health is a worldwide social goal that requires the action of many sectors.
2. The existing gross inequality in people’s health status is unacceptable and is of common concern to all countries and people.
3. Economic and social development is essential to attaining health for all, and health is essential to sustained development and world peace.
4. People have the right and duty to participate in planning and implementing health care.
5. A main goal of governments and the international community should be the attainment by all peoples by the year 2000 of a level of health that will permit them to lead a socially and economically productive life. Primary health care is the key to attaining this goal.
6. Primary health care is based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible through people’s full participation and at a cost that the community and country can afford. It is the central function of the health system and its first level of contact, bringing health care as close as possible to where people live and work.
7. Primary health care evolves from a country’s own conditions and addresses the main health problems in the community. It should lead to progressive improvement of health care for all while giving priority to those most in need.
8. Governments should formulate policies and plans of action to make primary health care part of a comprehensive national health system, in coordination with other sectors. This requires political will to mobilize domestic and external resources.
9. The attainment of health in any one country directly concerns and benefits every other country. All countries should cooperate in the development and operation of primary health care throughout the world.
10. An acceptable level of health for all people by 3000 can be attained through better use of the world's resources, much of which is spent on military conflict.
    

References[edit]

This article "Holy Land Ministry" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical. Articles taken from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be accessed on Wikipedia's Draft Namespace.