theheavenlyfather

Blessed are the poor....

2010-06-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

These were his instructions: "Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic. Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them."

-Mark 6:8-11

Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

-Matthew 19:21

Jesus' sayings on poverty in one form or another are some of the most prevalent in the gospels. Indeed, John the Baptist's trek in the desert eating insects and Jesus' temptation in the desert are both in a sense forms of intentional poverty. Additionally, Jesus expected his followers in his time to give up their wealth if they wanted to play a larger role in his ministry. Many of his closest disciples were in fact rich by the standards of their time, and had to give that up.

We can be completely confident that Jesus' sayings on poverty were in fact directly from Jesus. If falsehood ever crept into the New Testament, we can be sure it wasn't in regard to this. Why? Because poverty became an uncomfortable idea once the Church became institutionalized. Early Church fathers would have no reason to fabricate it, and much reason to cover it up. In later centuries, the Church would depict Jesus crucified as bearing a money bag, to support their belief that the extensive property of the Church was justified. The cozy relationship between many churches these days and the rich in society tells me that not much has changed.

By itself, there is nothing good to say about poverty. There is too much of it. To be without food, without shelter, without resources, is bad enough: but add to this the shameful ways that society treats the poor, and it is clear that poverty in itself is an unfortunate thing. What then is it good for, and why did Jesus apparently insist on it, at least for those who wanted to be more perfect?

Many people in this country have a hard enough time being relatively rich by world standards. What happens to a Christian when he is poor? He is no longer anesthetized by his possessions. He can see his own wretched state more clearly, and is thrown back on his faith more completely. He depends on God, not himself. Something that Jesus said time and time again is that people lacked faith, and that faith could move mountains. I have no doubt that this kind of faith is even more lacking today than it was then.

Poverty for those who lack faith, is purposeless suffering. For those who have faith, poverty in all its forms (fasting, trials, privation) is a means through which the shapeless mush that is in our souls turns to steel. All these things we own, are anesthesia for our souls. Sometimes the anesthesia wears off and we realize that we are not happy despite all we own and do. All our pretty things are really ashes and dust. This is the awakening that can lead a man to God. This is the meaning of spiritual poverty, to be thrown back on our true selves in all our weakness, and to throw ourselves on God in total faith. Poverty is the furnace in which saints are made.

Do I think that anyone should embrace the kind of radical poverty today that the disciples and Jesus embraced? No, for these reasons:

One, this society is far more hostile to the poor and to God than the society in First Century Israel. In Jesus' time (as in the Third World today), the poor were omnipresent. They were just as persecuted as today, but they weren't completely shut out of society. Today, if you are poor, the strong belief of the majority is that there is something badly wrong with you. I really cannot recommend homelessness as an evangelism strategy in this day and age.

Two, except for possibly some exceptional individuals, a modern equivalent of St. Francis, we aren't ready for it. Things have decayed too much since Jesus walked the Earth. Too much needs to be revived and reclaimed, Christianity is on life support these days regardless of what anyone tells you. (Apply this rule: by their fruits you will know them.) Poverty needs to be reclaimed just as much as the rest of Christianity, but in steps which are appropriate to our condition. Babies need milk before they can eat meat.

But if we use this as a cop-out to never eat the meat of poverty in any form, and to remain like the rest of our materialistic society, we simply fail and deceive ourselves. We become incapable of seeing ourselves truly anymore and believe we are good Christians when we are hardly real Christians at all. We become anesthetized to the truth.

Peace.

Light or Darkness

2010-03-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

"Open your heart, Judas, not your mind"

-spoken by Jesus to Judas in the miniseries "Jesus of Nazareth"

Suppose some scientist, however unlikely this might seem, could come up with a formula proving God's nonexistence. What would I do? I would still believe in Him.

What if, upon the discovery of this formula, belief in God was made illegal, with harsh penalties or even death for those who believe? I would still believe in Him.

Why?

There is either a Light in this world, or it is the most abject darkness without a trace of redeeming features. There is either Light or there is the total absence of light. Although the world sometimes seems predominated with shades of gray, you cannot even see grayness without light.

Were it proven to me that there is no God, then I would seek to be the Light for as long as I live, so that at least as long as I am, there is Light. Jesus himself said the same thing:

While I am in the world, I am the light of the world. Jn 9:5

Which is not to say that he didn't believe in a greater Light which is God, but that he was vowing to be the manifestation of that Light while he was here. And in fact he said the same thing about his followers in Mt. 5:14, that THEY are the light of the world too.

The difference between believing in God as a proposition and living that belief is faith. This is faith: not a belief in that for which you lack evidence, but to make your soul like steel, like a titanium sword, pointed towards a higher directive that supercedes mere logic. It is not a determination of the mind, it is a determination of the heart and spirit.

If there is not Light, meaning a spiritual force of order, peace, love and unity, then there is only abject darkness period. And the source of this Light is God.

Were it to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is not, then I would say what He said when the Universe was yet unformed: Let there be Light.

Compass Heart

2010-03-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

Everyone follows what is in their heart. There is no point in reasoning about that from which all reasoning follows. One's heart can seek peace, love and building up, or it can love war, hate and destruction. Most muddle through somewhere in between, not even knowing their heart. Changing one's heart is not something that can be done by words alone. But the words should be out there to remind one, of roads not yet taken.

I cannot prove to you that there is a God of unspeakable beauty and benevolence who has kind plans for us. It is not provable. I know it is true, but the mind is a malleable thing. You cannot trust my mind, you cannot even trust your own. The same is true of all of us.

I can only tell you what the alternative is. A world that is purely random chance and matter in motion, without God, without soul, would be a deep dark black chasm from which there is no escape. And that is in fact what the world is, whether you know it or not, for those who do not have God.

What is your heart's desire? Cars? Women? Riches? Power? Acclaim? Do you know what all these things are? DUST. In a few hundred years, they will not be remembered, nor will you. You will be having your party in a tiny micro-instant of time, you will be partying on the Titanic, and on your deathbed, you will likely not be remembering your fancy car or nice house or hot chicks. You will be realizing that you BLEW IT. You will be remembering that you now have nothing of real value in the whole world. Sure you may still own that luxury automobile, can't do much driving on your deathbed though. Sure you might have a big house, but you are only going to be using one room of it. You may have adoring fans, but they only love your image, not you. They would tear you apart for a scrap of your pajamas.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

There is a God who loves you, regardless of how wretched you are. Human beings love what they can see, but God loves the unseen. Not the pathetic wretch that you are, but the saint you could be. That is because God always lifts up, always revives, always builds.

Unfortunately, God does not interfere with you if you do not want Him to. He doesn't force you to love Him. If you want a heart for God, you have to ask Him for it.

So I ask you what is in your heart. Is it love, peace and building up, or something else. If it is something else you might not be able to change your heart, but God can. Ask Him. :)

Jeremy Irons talks about the Death Penalty

2010-03-02T20:27:00.000-08:00

Tunnel Vision

2010-01-16T10:26:00.001-08:00

This is not precisely a post on a spiritual topic, but in a way it is. We are so obsessed as a society with short term costs and gains that we don't build for the future the way we once did.

What would be the short-term cost to the individual of having some form of alternate energy generation in their homes that doesn't use fossil fuels? Well it would be significant, but not more so than many frivilous things people spend money on. Most houses and even more businesses have some form of alternate energy generation possibilities. Wind, solar (solar cells are not a favorite of mine because they have to be replaced periodically and they usually have associated batteries that have to be replaced periodically), wood, cogeneration. Many businesses especially view waste heat as an undesireable by-product not a valuable means of generating energy. Hook that waste heat up to stirling engines and generators, you have electricity which can MAKE you money. But nobody wants to do the upfront cost, even if it pays for itself.

Everyone knows that rail travel is more energy efficient than flying, and moving things by rail more efficient than moving them by truck or airplane. Do we have a nationwide system of high speed rail? No. Why? The costs are too high, even if they pay for themselves in time. Yet somehow we always have plenty of money for wars which benefit no one, and for bailing out corporations that will go right back to lying in the same unproductive mud they came from.

What would the social effect be of such things as cogeneration, widespread local power generation not using fossil fuels, and more efficient moving of people and material? Enormous. The balance of trade would start improving drastically, the economy would improve, and we have a certain amount of buffer room in the case of foreign instability. More money would stay here instead of going overseas.

In the end, it comes down to a religious question. Yes, religious. Do we believe in something greater than our own bellies, or are we only concerned with here and now and self? Do we believe in building things up or do we believe in passively consuming? Our country prospered up through the 1960's because at least in part, we did believe in preparing and overpreparing for the future. We believed in building, and building is an act of faith.

What were the 1980's called...? the Me generation.

What I Believe and Think

2009-12-18T13:06:00.000-08:00

In case anyone was wondering:

I believe that God is infinite love, infinitely worthy to be loved, and infinite creations emanate from Him, which He places where they belong. He is a never-ending explosion of grace and blessings and creation.

I think that the World is a neutral place where He placed us, not wishing to force us to love Him but giving us the opportunity to do so if we wished to. God is all powerful yet so gentle that He did not wish to compel his creation, Man, to follow Him but rather to decide for himself.

I believe that God is not jealous of other gods because they don't exist.

I believe that God is not wrathful, we must not imbue God with our own sins.

I believe that God is ONE, there is only ONE God. Not three-in-one, One. God invites beings into unity with Himself, and in that sense they are one with him but not the same as Him. Jesus had unity with God but is not himself God.

I think that there is no hell as such, but if you show that you love lower forms of existence, that is where you go. You get what you wanted. If you love God you go towards God. It does not however matter what you say, whether you say you are a Christian or not, it is what is in your heart and what you do that matters.

I believe that nobody gets to tell God how to create worlds, so if he brought us about through evolution, that's fine with me.

I believe that sin is like an onion, you scrub off one layer only to find another. This is because we have a lot of accreted sin due to our condition on Earth, but every layer you can scrape off matters. Those who want a precise number of sins, want this so that they don't have to keep on repenting and so can keep a certain amount of sin for themselves. Everything that is not in God's will for you to do is a sin.

I believe that nothing can be sacrificed for, nothing given to, and nothing taken away from God.

I believe that God can come to live with you in your heart, and convict you about right and wrong.

I believe in eternal life in God.

I believe that religions should not be founded by unrepentant murderers. Both Judaism and Islam were founded by bloodthirsty maniacs, Moses and Mohammed respectively.

I believe that all these words I am saying are ultimately unimportant, it is the presence of God in and through your life that are important.

God and Christ

2009-12-17T11:47:00.001-08:00

Given the season, it would almost seem blasphemous to be questioning Christ's divinity. However, bear with me, because there is nothing holy in perpetuating lies, however well intentioned.

In the account of Jesus' baptism, the usual account goes that God says something like:

This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

on the occasion of Jesus rising from the water. However, very many ancient authors including the authors of Acts and Hebrews say that God said something else:

You are my Son; today I have become your Father.

In other words, Jesus became the Son on his baptism. Which is in fact relates very well to the whole point of baptism: to become born again, or a sign that you are born again. Born again of whom? God.

Which points towards one inevitable conclusion: Christ is not God. Christ is Christ, critical in the salvation process, our savior, the Son of God, but is not equal to God. We all know what the word Christ means in keeping with Israel's (selfish, violent) messianic desires - annointed one or king - but what does his other signifier, Immanuel, mean? God with us. Not as God who somehow steps down from heaven and becomes man, but as a God who enters our hearts. And whose heart did he enter first? A carpenter from Galilee.

No ordinary man, granted. He was planned, molded, intended for one purpose: to be a message from God. Not just a messenger who delivers text, but a message who incarnates God's will and demonstrates the kind of life God wishes for us. The absolute core of Jesus' message is precisely GOD IN US. Not that we are God any more than Christ was, but that we become united to God.

Now people say "How can you say Christ is not God when he says things that no human has the right to say? Things like I am the Way, the Truth and the Life" Well in fact we do not have the right to say that, because we are not Christ. We can be messengers, but the message came through Christ.

Christ is the Way (he is showing us a clear way to God not based on human understanding)

Christ is the Truth (he himself is made to be the message from God)

Christ is the Life (because if we do not follow him in living in God and God in us, we have no true life).

However we have been confused, and we have let other people in the past confuse us, as to Christ's nature. When people say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, I would have to ask "which bible?" A bible like the NIV is composed by people sorting through the many ancient texts and authors trying to figure out what is the most "accurate" version. People, people who called themselves Christian, accidentally and on purpose distorted the original message and made Christ, God. There are innumerable passages that directly or indirectly refute this idea.

"So Christ also did not take upon himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him, "You are my Son; today I have become your Father."

-Hebrews 5:5

We (Jews) worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.

-John 4:22, Jesus speaking to a Samaritan woman, indicating that he is a Jew and that he worships God as one. I can't see God worshipping Himself.

Jesus:

Asked questions he didn't know the answers to.

Is not omnipotent (Mark 10:40)

Indicated limited information (Mark 13:32)

Asked God whether it was possible for Him to reverse His decision on whether Jesus was to be crucified. (Matt. 26:39)

Felt abandoned by God on the cross (Mark 15:34)

He is the only Christ, of which there is only one in all creation, the Son of God, our savior. Whether he was a pre-existent angelic being or just a human is not something anyone can answer. But he is not equal to God. There is no Trinity.

The message has been skewed and propagandized by people in the past and the present who have an agenda that has nothing to do with God. It is time to reclaim the message from the things that have become attached to it.

Jesus was not calling us to worship him. He was calling us to follow him. He is our shepherd, our master, our teacher, but not equal to God. It is much easier to adore than follow, so it is no wonder that this message has been toned down by those who came after.

"Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

Would You Bomb A Sister?

2009-12-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

Part of a human family portrait

A very large chunk of human problems come from failure to understand a simple obvious truth:

People are all fundamentally the same and are all fundamentally in the same situation.

You are at worst 50th cousin to every other human being on Earth. Your DNA is 99.9% identical to that of every other human being on Earth. We are the same.

And we are in the same situation. We have this fallible decayable flesh, we are born into a situation we don't understand, we suffer, we feel alone, we get aches and pains and flu and other diseases, sometimes we get fun enjoyable things, then eventually our bodies are handed over to death and corruption and worms, either through painful death or painless death, but death all the same.

So when we inflict suffering on another, essentially the same thing happens as what happens when someone inflicts suffering on you: human suffering nonetheless. We wouldn't, I hope, drop a bomb on our family members, but we do on other people. Maybe we have temporally important reasons to do it, but we are still killing our kindred. We are still filling the cup of human suffering ever higher.

Now we may not all agree on what to do about our situation, but still we must acknowledge that we are all in it, together. And yet hardly anyone thinks about it. They think about their family and their friends and their nation and the trivia of the world, and don't think about the fact that must be evident to everyone who can reason. That we are all basically the same, and all in the same boat.

To me the answer is implicit in the problem: We should have unity but do not. And where can unity be found? Of whom is it said that He is "One"? One, The One. God.

It is said that God is Love, which is the same as saying that God is unity and God is the One. Where can our unity be found? The One. Where can love be found? The One.

God is Love. Love is the One. The One is Union.

Compassion

2009-12-03T20:55:00.000-08:00

Do I think being compassionate will save the world?
No, it can only save our souls, and to the World a soul is less than a nothing.

Do I think being compassionate can save someone else?

God alone saves. If we are compassionate to another, it is God being compassionate through us.

Do I want others to be compassionate to me?

Yes, but I want to be compassionate to them regardless.

Why?

I refuse to believe that others are different from myself.

When any flesh suffers, a part of me suffers.

Compassion is the weakest force in the world, weaker than a breeze. It molds the strongest souls. It takes strength to believe in compassion in a bad world.

God's power in this world is as light as a feather, but no one can overcome it. It is gentle as a lamb, but no one can destroy it. It is as invisible as air, but no one can fail to breathe it.

Compassion is the vehicle of God's work with us, which is unity. That we would no longer be alienated from Him, but in harmony with Him.

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

-John 17:20-23

Folly

2009-12-03T11:07:00.001-08:00

It is pure folly for a person to value a mug of beer over learning a new thing.

It is pure folly for a person to value cheap sex over learning a new skill.

It is pure folly for a person to build up the outside of their life, and not the inside.

It is pure folly for a person once knowing the emptiness of the world, not to seek to know themselves.

It is pure folly for a person once knowing the limits of themselves, not to seek to know something beyond themselves and the world both.

It is pure folly once knowing that One, not to love Him.

It is pure folly, but it goes on all the time.

All Men Will Know

2009-11-30T23:33:00.000-08:00

By this all men will know that you are my disciples...

How do people know that you are a disciple of Christ? Do you tell them? Telling people you are a Christian and verbally evangelizing is actually about the least effective thing you can do, aside from doing nothing.

How do people know that you are His disciple? If you speak and act exactly like everyone else, if you are cursing and getting drunk and being spiteful towards your enemies, gossipping about people, obsessed with money and things, then people will know you for what you are - you are a person of the World.

If you don't act like a pilgrim and an alien in this world, then it won't matter whatsoever how well you speak, no one will believe you. They will believe you if they can see for themselves that you have something different.

...if you love one another.

Somehow, somewhere, "church life" became confused on this point. Yes, it is a requirement as a Christian to love other people unconditionally, regardless of their worthiness to be loved. Nothing is less Christian than a group of grim bible thumpers. Love however requires involvement, and too few people make the time for that. Nor will they take the time for that, unless they see other Christians setting the example.

This to me is the most telling phrase in the New Testament, in terms of how far modern Christian practice has fallen from the example Christ gave to the disciples:

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
-John 13:34-35

Sin: The Uncut Version

2009-11-24T11:10:00.000-08:00

The heavily edited version of sin, debuting around 900 b.c. in theaters across the Middle East, goes something like this:

DO NOT DO x, y or z, for they are sins.

The Ten Commandments, in other words. Even when they evolved into several thousand commandments, such as do not eat a camel, do not cook a calf in its mother's milk, this was okay because people love to know what the ground rules are so they can get around them.

These rules were a concession, perhaps a training device, because if God had told them what sin really was, it would have BLOWN THEIR MINDS. It still has the capacity to blow people's minds. They would have run screaming into the desert never to return.

So they went along following their rules, and then Jesus came along. Now Jesus did several things straight off that turned the rules on their heads.

First, he focused on what you should do, not what you must not do. In other words, his focus was on mercy not merely justice, on goodness not merely righteousness. On love, not just respect. He was interested in breaking down barriers to goodness, not in setting up limits to evil.

Secondly he said that the spirit of a law was more important than the letter of it. In other words, what did God intend men to do and be? This was more important than a legalistic interpretation. He was seeking to conform the hearts of men to God, not just their bodies.

Thirdly and very critically, he said that the intention of the heart could sin just as much as the action of the body. In other words, the man who looks at a woman lustfully has committed a form of adultery, even if he has done nothing legally wrong against the Law.

Jesus was in fact revealing to us a very different vision of sin:

A sin is any thought, word or action that is contrary to the will of God. It is also the absence of thoughts, words or actions that God does will.

So you can see from this that virtually everyone sins almost continually. There are no rules to follow, to save you from this sin.

Now you may say, "who knows the mind of God? How can we be responsible to do what we cannot possibly know to do? And if we did all these things, would we not be automatons constantly obeying an impossibly demanding ruler?"

Here it may be helpful to think of sin as a state of being, rather than a precise transgression. Sin is a state of disunity with God. It is impossible for someone in an active state of disunion with God to please God. For someone who desires disunity with God, who desires to go his or her own way, of course this definition of sin must be impossible to deal with. Unlike the Law, this definition gives the sinner no place to hide, no way of being externally obedient while being internally disobedient. If you want to run your own life, if you want "freedom from" God, you are in a state of sin. Period. If there are areas of your life you want to segregate from God, keeping those areas to yourself, those areas are sin. For instance, if you want to separate your business dealings from your life in God, your business dealings are sin.

At this point I want to bring up a very interesting quote from Jesus, speaking of his disciples:

"My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one."

So on the one hand Jesus is speaking of the Father as greater than himself, on the other hand he is saying that he and the Father are one. Jesus' subserviance to the Father is something that is well documented in the gospels; his mystical unity with the Father is also well attested. This is because Jesus is literally one with God, which is to say that God expresses Himself without limit in Jesus. Jesus has God's spirit in him, he has unity with God, and he is not at all whatsoever in rebellion to Him. Jesus is united to but not identical to the Father. The Father is greater.

Similarly, the means of our escape from the state of sin is unity with God. For God's spirit to dwell with us. It is no more servitude or robotlikeness for someone united with God to serve God, than it would be for a loving wife to remove her husband's shoes. Your will is united to God's will. Sin is the slavery, even if it is done in the name of your own will.

Now people who have God's spirit still sin on occasion, hopefully not too badly. When they do sin, so long as that sin does not consist of a total breach with God, it is treated as a teaching exercise, because God's spirit in them is able to teach them. God knows that it is a difficult world full of troubles and temptations, and that our understanding is limited. The difference is in truly wanting unity with God, obedience to God.

Those who have God in them, are children of God. Children meaning quite literally, those who are in training, who have not yet grown up. The Children are not condemned, because through Jesus Christ who has opened up the way for the Spirit to enter us, we have committed to become united to God. We have come to terms with the One whom we previously rebelled against - indeed He has sought us out for us to make peace with Him and more than peace. Unity.

Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one.
-John 17:11

The Most Subversive Device Ever Invented

2009-11-19T09:38:00.000-08:00

image via wikimedia commons

Without a lick of protest, indeed with great adulation, the most subversive machine ever invented was introduced. A machine more corrosive to the social fabric cannot easily be imagined and hopefully will never be invented.

With the advent of this device:

Billions if not trillions of hours of productive living are cut short.
People are encouraged to live vicariously instead of actually living.
The social, physical and mental development of millions of children are compromised.
The nation grows more and more obese.
Propaganda and indoctrination is made easy.
New careers arise whereby people who do nothing worthwhile can get rich.
Artificial panics can be created for social and political manipulation.
Workers can be placated and are less likely to rebel against their conditions.
Newspapers are rarely read.
People become trained for passivity.

And much, much more. What, may you ask, is this horrible device? What is this nemesis of human life? If it were a weapon, hurled at us by an enemy, there would no doubt be a terrible war. And yet we have done it to ourselves. What is this engine of evil, you may ask?

THE TELEVISION.

Now, to be fair, I thought of whether the computer could be conceived in the same terms. I didn't want to lance someone else's sacred cow without being willing to lance my own. :) The difference is that the computer has many positive aspects as well as negative ones. The only positive attribute of television is that it allows you to dispense with a certain segment of your life in a reasonably pleasant manner. Aside from that, it is pretty much pure evil.

An Implicit Entelechy

2009-11-18T14:30:00.000-08:00

We see grass and trees growing, and we know that grass and trees as well as all living things, need certain things in order to thrive. When you see them thriving, you know they are getting these things, and when they do not, you know that they are not getting what they need or they are getting something harmful to them.

We see this all the time, and everyone knows it. Why do we not apply this same understanding to ourselves?

Look around yourself in a grocery store. Over half of all Americans are overweight, a third are considered obese.

Maybe more importantly, look at their faces. Are they happy? I don't see happy in too many faces. Maybe they're just not showing it, or maybe they just aren't.

Now it is true, many people have unhappy family backgrounds which are a main contributor to the situation, but it's a vicious circle. Unhappy people make unhappy children who make unhappy people.

The litany of social problems that we have do not reveal a happy America. Drug abuse, food abuse, sex abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse, murder, theft, and so on do not reveal a picture of an America full of happy people. I have never seen a happy abuser.

Why is this? It is because they are lacking something they need.

That something is purpose. An organizing principle to orient their lives. An energizing force to invigorate their lives. A moral compass to guide them.

The purpose for which we were born is to become children of God. Those who do not engage with that purpose will not be happy.

There is an organizing force to that purpose, which extends from above to below, from God to me and from me to you and from you to your children.

This organizing force is love.

This love is the organizing force that keeps human beings happy and healthy, agape love from God. This love is not rootless or sourceless, its source is firmly rooted in God.

Children without love are unhappy
Adults without love feel alienated
The elderly without love feel that they are expendable.

There is a trick with this love however, which is that many if not all of us in our natural state feel that we are incapable of it. It is not in us to give. You're right! It is God's to give, and you cannot truly give it unless God's spirit enters into you through the spirit, teaching and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

This is all part of the order which we were designed for. God shows His love for you, you show His love to others. If you want to be happy and fulfilled, this is the only way, it is what you exist for, to be children of God.

Marriage

2009-11-17T18:44:00.000-08:00

Marriage is a big part of the way this society identifies itself. It is almost considered a proof of normalcy and wholesomeness. Why such a furor over gay marriage? It is not because there is this huge demand for gay marriage built up out there, it is because marriage is considered a sign of normalcy. Gays want it, many straights want to deprive them of it.

Marriage is considered so much a part of the fabric of society that people can feel deeply inadequate when they fail to marry, to the point of having nervous breakdowns. People can suffer greatly when they fail to find "That Special Someone" that we have all been told is out there. Since social life is organized around dating and marriage, unmarried people can feel socially isolated, or that their only social outlet is the "meet market".

And however much marriage dominates normal society, it dominates modern Christianity even more. It does so to the point where the church can become an institution catering to couples with children above everything else. The modern church would no more go without its day care center than a bible. Marriage is considered a sacrament (never read that anywhere in the New Testament) and it is possible that a lot of people never see the insides of churches except at weddings.

What did Jesus and the apostles say about marriage?

It is second-best.

It is an accommodation to a sinful people who can't keep their pants zipped up, basically. It is better to marry than to commit adultery and fornicate all over the place. What then is first-best according to Jesus and the apostles?

The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry."

Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."
-Matthew 19:10-12

So basically Jesus is saying, "I know that most people can't handle this, but for those who can, to remain single and celibate is better."

Paul said the same thing:

Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.
-1 Corinthians 7:1-2

I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all men were as I am.
-1 Corinthians 7:6-7

Paul gives one rationale of many for this point of view:

I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided.
-1 Corinthians 7:32-34

There is a bad word going around among Christian pastors that God intended sex for our frequent enjoyment and that He is happy to see us going after it like horny bunnies. Sex was intended for one thing: to make sure that the Earth isn't going to run out of human beings any time soon. Mission accomplished.

Jesus makes it clear for us in Matthew that there isn't going to be any married people in heaven:

At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.
-Matthew 22:30

And Paul says we may not even have any gender.

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

-Galatians 3:26-28

So sex and marriage are artifacts of this world and of the life of the flesh. In the Kingdom of Heaven and the life of the spirit, there will not be such things nor will they be missed. Those who are able, can begin living that life of the spirit here and now.

So we see that marriage is a compromise to our weak natures, a concession not a goal. Those to whom that gift has been given, can do without that compromise.

Those who can accept it should accept it.

New Wineskins

2009-11-11T12:01:00.000-08:00

"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."
-Matthew 9:16-17

This afternoon, I saw what I was looking for. It hit me like a bolt of lightning right in the head. I have bad joints and I usually move slowly, but this afternoon I ran up the stairs to get this down before I lose it.

I have for a long time taken it as fact, that Christianity in the world today has come down with a disease that threatens its mission, its mission which is nothing less than the communication of the means for the salvation of Mankind. But we, our ancestors, we ourselves, have allowed a rot to fester in it.

This doesn't mean that people aren't being saved, or that we don't really have a relationship with Jesus because we do. But that relationship is as if we are a shipwrecked sailor saved at the edge of the whirlpool, because the World has interfered with our message and we ourselves have interfered with it.

We have taken the Light, delivered to us by holy angels and have treated it like a human philosophy.

This quote from Matthew was the bell whose tone finally got through to me. We have been treating it like blasphemy to make Jesus' message new to each new generation. We have been treating it almost like sin for us to rediscover Jesus anew in each new generation.

We must not do so in order to change what Jesus taught. We must do so to discover what Jesus taught.

Every Christian knows that part of Jesus' mission is so that God's will could be written on our hearts, not on tablets of stone. This is not to make it easier to keep the law. This is because there was no law to begin with. God's spirit cannot be written on stone or even spoken in words, it is a living thing, and a living thing will always transcend whatever can be said about it.

YOU CANNOT FIND GOD IN A BOOK. Books are helpful things, I am not saying not to use them. I am saying that they of themselves are not important. Creeds of themselves are not important. The important thing is A LIVING EXPERIENCE OF GOD. A living experience of God changing your heart.

You cannot cause such a thing to happen. You cannot cause this by reciting certain words. You cannot cause this by enacting certain rituals. You can open yourselves to this, but the knowledge of God cannot be encapsulated in any human reasoning. It transcends human knowledge.

We have turned God into events at church and events in a book and laws and regulations and words and principles. God is beyond any such things.

God does not want to be part of your life, along with soccer practice and boys night out. FINDING GOD IS THE ENTIRE POINT OF LIFE.

Similarly, accomodating your view of God to your way of life is ridiculous. You have to accomodate your life to THE ONLY IMPORTANT THING.

What is needed in Christianity now are revolutionaries. Not to accomodate God to the World, as is taking place. To tear down the accomodations that have already taken place and to focus on the DIRECT UNMEDIATED EXPERIENCE OF GOD.

Any Christian who is talking to you about laws and commandments should immediately stand out as someone who has lost their way. Not because the commandments are wrong or right, commandments miss the point. Commandments in themselves are an accomodation to a sinful Mankind who does not have the spirit of God within them.

There are only two commandments you need to worry about, and only as guides:

LOVE GOD and LOVE ONE ANOTHER

You cannot love God if you don't even know God. And as I said, you cannot know God from a book. Not even the Bible. The Bible is a helper, that's all.

There are some people who say that the Bible is the word of God.

THE WORD OF GOD CANNOT BE SPOKEN.

When God speaks, worlds come into existence not words. I had a vision once, but I did not fully understand it at the time. I understand it now. I heard angels praising God, but the words they spoke could not be translated into human words or even into our concept "word". This is in line with what Paul said when he said:

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.

Everyone who considers themselves Christian must seek God with their whole hearts, not as someone defined for all time in a book, but as someone who reveals Himself to you in real time, in experience. We must have the courage to give all, so that we can know the God who interacts with us and reveals Himself to us in direct experience. That means we have to have the courage to tear down our beloved golden calves with our own hands and grapple hard with each other and God.

These words I am speaking to you are not the truth. They are a pointer to the truth.

God alone is Truth.

The Thieves of Paradise

2009-11-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

There is the paradise in heaven and there is the paradise on Earth. The paradise in heaven is much better as it is closer to God, but the paradise on Earth is far better than to live as the vast majority on Earth do.

There are a great many people, most people at some time or another, who are thieves of paradise. However, most thieves themselves possess what they steal from others. Thieves of paradise do not have what they steal from others, and they have less and less chance of ever having it.

Those who speak to you of murders and uprisings and other atrocities say they are trying to keep you informed. Of what value is that? Hatred has never been defeated by information, hatred is defeated by love. War is defeated by peace.

Those who run after riches and encourage you to do likewise, this only results in more running after riches. They are thieves of paradise.

Those who love loud noise do not love peace. They are thieves of paradise. The music of one tree is better music than all human music.

Those who seek to dominate, belittle, flatter, or control men are thieves of their own paradise and that of others.

Those who are busy, running to and fro all the time, have lost their paradise and will try to remove yours.

Where can you find this paradise, you may ask?

"If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows (the unfortunate or oppressed) in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
~James 1:26-27

The Church as Counterculture

2009-10-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

Roll another blunt Jesus (kidding).

Since the beginning, Christianity has had a pastor/congregation, shepherd/flock structure to it. In a very heavily missionary church, this makes a certain amount of sense. If you are the first Christian among people who have never heard of Christ, you want to make sure the message does not get contaminated. So you appoint leaders, and they appoint leaders, and so on to make sure there is always an "answer man" for the missionized former heathens to go to.

In America however, this structure has led to a Church with arteriosclerosis. Its own structure is killing it. The time has come to re-evaluate a structure that too easily gives people leave to stay out of community with other people. It is time to criticize a structure that too easily lends itself to people being Christian on Sunday and heathens on Monday.

Look at the church phenomenon of our times - the Megachurch. A church where everyone fills a stadium-like chamber, sings a bit, listens to one or a few guys on a stage far away, and everyone files out again. It isn't even possible to know your church members face to face. This is a structure that serves the interest of men, not God. They want to get their dose of Jesus and get out again so they can screw over some more people on Monday. So they can get down as expeditiously as possible to the business of doing what they want, satisfying their own desires. So many pastors that find their way into the newspaper from such megachurches do this as well, talk about Jesus on Sunday and ply male prostitutes with crystal meth on Monday. No wonder so many people look down on Christianity. To the extent that they are looking down on that sort of Christianity, they are right to do so.

What is a church? A real church? It is not a building with stained glass with a man in a funny suit standing at a podium. A real church is a community. What kind of a community? The kind where you talk about the weather or the stock market on the way out the door to your car? No. The kind of community where you have face time with other people in that community every day. The kind where you can talk about your dreams, your fears, your deepest problems, as well as the faith that you hold in Jesus Christ. A community of love.

What was Jesus' commandment at the end of the last supper in John?

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
-John 13:34-35

This, far more than the supposed institution of Peter as leader, is the founding event of the Church. And love does not mean saying "hi" in Church on the way to the parking lot. It means being in each others lives, telling each other our heart, being there for one another.

It is also clear that almost everything in our present society sets itself in opposition to such a community. Employers encourage or compel workers to work overtime and often in such dehumanizing and unnatural contexts that the person has no energy for anything but staring at the idiot box afterwards. For those who have an ounce of energy still left, there are a plethora of empty entertainments available - organized sports, dangerous drugs, bars, cheap sex - to divert people from the emptiness of their existence and to keep them from coming to God.

In fact - dare I say it? The present state of society in America if not the world is a system, designed to crush any opportunity for people to come together in true brotherhood. A system designed to crush your soul. The devil must be very pleased with the extent to which his system works.

What is the next step for true Christians, to reclaim the Church as it should be? I wish I knew for certain. Paradoxically, even though online relationship networks can be the ultimate in pseudo-community, it can also serve as a gateway towards living as the true Church. Frankly, in any one neighborhood, the number of people who are really radically committed to Christ may be very small. Online communication can help find like-minded people and break the ice.

This is not the ideal. This is a first step. Find people who are willing to step out of the church-box and into radical community in Christ.

Secondly, we need to embrace church as counterculture. As not a part of the materialist culture around us. The church that is integrated into the me-first culture is not only not helping but positively harmful. The culture is anti-Christian. Time to throw the money-changers out of the temple. We also have to accept that we may well be derided, spit on and otherwise treated unfairly if we do that. And other Christians will likely be at the head of that line to do the spitting, because we will be challenging them most of all.

That is a sign of the true Church: if people don't hate you for following Christ, you're doing something wrong.

Do Not Judge

2009-10-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

Blind lady Justice is reading her a book and squeezing on a tiny little dude.

Jesus famously said:

"Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven."
- Luke 6:37

Now judging people was implicit in the Jewish religion, so people must have thought, what are you talking about Jesus? It is a religion based on law. There is no use in having laws if you do not judge people according to them. So for Jewish people particularly in the First Century, this was a pretty alien concept.

This is a prime example of Jesus' audacity, his vision, his differentness from his own generation. For normal human beings, this level of vision, this level of originality, is not really possible. Of course, he was the Son of God, so different rules apply. :) This is also one reason to believe that the biblical miracles did in fact happen, because if he wasn't doing some serious supernatural stuff, nobody would have listened to him. He was that different.

Anyway, there are several reasons why not judging people is a very good idea for Christians.

1. Human judgment is extremely flawed.
There are all sorts of instances where innocent people have been put in jail for long periods of time. Outside of a legal context, when we judge other people ("you're lazy", "you're foolish" ect.) we are acting as if we have perfect knowledge of their situation. Even the person involved doesn't have perfect knowledge of their situation. What we may call lazy may be a symptom of a legitimate fatigue-causing illness, for example. Human judgment is not colorblind, genderblind, or otherwise unbiased. Even people who we might think are paragons of fairness, are still susceptible to bias in these ways. We also tend to excuse people we like more than those we don't like.

2. Judgement as an approach does not lead people to repent of what they did.
The most obvious fault of human justice is that in itself it does not reduce the incidences of injustice. Of course, if you throw someone in a dungeon and throw away the key, whether they are guilty or innocent it is certain that they will never commit an injustice because they are locked in a dungeon. In most cases however, people who do things wrong do remain in society or return to it eventually.

The Christian thing to do is to work with someone to try to get them back into the community, back into a decent relationship with their fellow human beings. To approach them with compassion and teach them the same compassion. There is a problem with this however in that nowadays, "the community" is so screwed up and so many people are alienated from their fellow human beings that there is no "community" for people to get themselves right with. This is not a fault of the approach, its a fault of society. That is why we have so many criminals to begin with.

Of course we have to get dangerous people off the streets. However in most cases, people who go to jail will be right back out again after a few months, having learned the crafts of evil all the better. I am not asking for a new legal system here, but a new way of treating other people. I am saying, and I think Jesus is saying, that it is far better to get people to understand what they did than to stick a nasty label on them. It is better for all of us, because only that and not condemning them can actually lead them to stop doing whatever it is that they are doing wrong.

Of course judging and condemning people is easier and more emotionally satisfying, so that is why we do it. Easier, not better.

The Cottonwood

2009-10-23T12:55:00.001-07:00

The Sun was out today, for which I was grateful. It has been raining so much. I took a walk.

I walked by a huge cottonwood tree, its leaves were shaking in the wind. At that moment, I much prefered the sound of those leaves to any human music. Those people have a treasure in their yards, I wonder if they know it.

I walked very slowly - in my condition I can't do much else. I was aware however how much people feel it is necessary to walk briskly. They walk briskly because they are busy of course, but also I think because if they walk slowly, people will think they have nothing to do and will think less of them. Perhaps people act busier even than they are, so that no one will interact with them, assuming they are far too busy to talk.

People are too busy to know life, it passes them by. They are too busy to listen to the cottonwood. In the same way, Christians are too busy with Christian stuff to know God. They say God-this and God-that, and have all their theology neatly lined up, usually in such a way as to interfere with their pursuit of being busy as little as possible.

All the while, God is looking at them and saying, "so you say you want to be with Me, well here I am."

So many people are tearing up the road, they can't tear the road up fast enough, to get them where they believe they should be. When where they should be is already with them if they would see it.

"I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life."

-John 5:24

Has, present tense. Eternal life is with the faithful now. It will fully manifest later on, but it is present now.

We need to seek where that Life is hid, because I tell you the truth I don't see it manifested much in people.

Our churches focus on rituals and readings and preaching. For the busy, this is good. It means they can go in, do their Christian thing, and be back burning rubber as quickly as possible. Is this how the disciples lived? No, they were intimately involved in each others lives, and Jesus taught in terms of everyday things. Wheat, salt, soil, leaven.

Are we not disciples too? If we are disciples, why don't we act like disciples?

Boil It Down

2009-10-15T19:37:00.001-07:00

Christianity, the espresso version

I have been talking a lot lately about texts. Christians, like the Jewish religion before them, are text-obsessed. That being true, it is perhaps fair for me to criticize those texts, especially the texts handed down by Moses. Moses, if the Pentateuch is to be taken seriously, was a monster.

But all this text-reliance and text-criticism is also totally unimportant in comparison to the stakes in the world, in comparison to a darkened world without God. The letter kills, the spirit gives life. Let it not be said that lives were left in darkness just because one group of Christians were too busy arguing with another group of Christians about texts. Lets boil it down then, lets put it in a nutshell, and spend our time on the important stuff and not the unimportant stuff. What then is this Christianity, espresso version?

Compassion: love your neighbor as yourself.

I remember listening to a rock station in my car many years ago, and I had to switch the channel because they were reporting a major accident, probably involving fatalities, and the people were laughing about it. Laughing about someone lying on the road dying. I switched it to a Christian station and they were asking people to pray over the same accident. That is the difference between a person of the World and a Christian.

Rebirth from God: the changing of a sinful heart.

Even if you admire compassion, you may find that you really aren't very capable at it. Compassion isn't very natural to the heart you were born with. You were born as a creature of the World, with a heart of sin. The good news is that God can plant a new heart and a new spirit in you, that is different from the world. You can be reborn of God through Jesus Christ.

Relationship with God: Love the lord with all your heart.

You are not being invited to do some ritual for some remote god who doesn't care about you. You are being invited into a family, the family of God. Your relationship with God is henceforth the most important relationship you have. And it is a relationship with someone who will never let you down, and who will always love you.

Rejection of Sin: Being the body of Christ in the midst of the World.

God does not immediately whisk you up to heaven and away from all this the moment you become a Christian. You have to remain in the world as normal, and while you are in the world you are tempted to return to the ways of the world. Instead, you must be a representative of Christ in the world. You have to be His body in the world, along with all the other believers. You are to send a message to the world by what you say and do.

***

I am guilty of being text-obsessed lately, and I am going to stop myself, because it deflects from what we are supposed to be doing here.

Neutering Paul

2009-10-14T00:52:00.000-07:00

Paul was at dead-center to at least one of two major firefights in the early church that had the potential to determine what the mainline church would in fact be. I say one of two, because there is some doubt as to whether the first one happened, even though it is the more obvious of the two conflicts.

If the Pauline epistles are to believed, Paul was a stink bomb set right at the heart of Christianity. According to the Pauline epistles themselves, Paul (after persecuting the early church) suddenly had a revelation, and without referring to the Apostles or deriving authority from them as the 12 apostles of Jesus, straightaway started converting Gentiles and telling them that the Judaism that had been practiced for thousands of years was now obsolete.

So in other words, from direct revelation and NOT from apostolic authority or apostolic succession, he basically rewrote Christianity on his own authority. And did a pretty damn good job too. In the real world, the early Christians would have been wanting to hang him by his heels, not welcome him with open arms. Which raises the question of whether the given story of Paul, or indeed all his epistles, date from the late first century as claimed.

So lets switch to trying to understand a dogfight that we know happened, that in the second century. In the second century, the proto-Catholic church in Rome was locked in a fight to the death with the Marcionite churches, and at this date it looked like the Marcionites would win. Now the church of Rome derived its authority from Peter, who lived and died as a Jewish Christian. So the church of Rome wanted to not make any sort of drastic break from Jewish Christianity but compromise, upholding the value of the Old Testament.

The Marcionites, claiming to follow Paul as the only apostle who understood the true message of Christ, said that the Old Testament was at worst evil and at best superceded and irrelevant, and certainly no part of their list of holy texts. Now here is the thing: the Marcionites were the first people to gather a collection of Paul's epistles. Prior to this they were presumably scattered hither and yon. This collection rapidly became extremely popular with gentile Christians for its strong stance against circumcision and Jewish dietary laws. So the Proto-Catholics had to do something to "tone down" the Paul as revealed in the collection of epistles the Marcionites had gathered.

But the Marcionite origin for the collection of the Pauline epistles raises another question: how much of Paul is actually Marcion? Paul at times certainly seems to be the most un-Jewish Jew who ever lived. So he just one day up and starts eating gentile foods, no problemo? The Jewish Law is relegated to irrelevance without a wince? Circumcision is no longer a sign of the covenant, but a genuine obstacle to salvation? That's a lot of change in a short period, almost like he got reborn as a Gentile. That may not be so far from the truth.

But to the Roman church, the issue of where Paul comes from is not nearly as important as neutering Paul so that all the gentiles who love Paul can learn to love Rome too. :) In the Book of Acts, you can see the neutering program in action. The RCC created or adapted Acts in order to present a cleaned-up version of Paul. Not Paul the firebrand, not Paul the heretic, but Paul the evangelist. Acts is the second part, or added as a second part, to Luke, and we know Luke is the only gospel approved by Marcion. However Marcion's Luke is almost certainly not the Luke we have today, and it had no Acts of the Apostles as its second part. So the RCC is taking "Marcion's gospel", altering or reinventing it and slapping the Acts on as part II in which Paul does not fight with the Jewish church and isn't even the first Apostle to convert gentiles (Peter, the patron of Rome, is.) The fights with the Judaizing Christians, which is a persistent part of Paul's epistles (as well as Marcion's agenda), is nowhere to be seen in Acts.

Acts was a snow job, recycling a very unsettling and possibly heretical figure into a sturdy saint for the Catholic Church.

That there was a real Paul is likely, else why would Marcion have taken him as his patron saint? That we know the real Paul or that the Epistles reflect the real Paul, is less certain. Remember that Paul almost certainly wouldn't occupy the sort of central place in the orthodox canon that he does, if Marcion had not first collected (or invented) his letters from the four corners of the Roman Empire.

If the epistles are really from Paul for the most part (scholars accept pretty much that Timothy and Titus were anti-marcionite inventions and not from "Paul"), then his relationship to the Jewish church could hardly have been cozy. More like openly hostile. A group of Jewish Christians called the Ebionites, not very different from the original apostles in their upbringing and probably beliefs, would later vilify him in no uncertain terms. In the second century, the proto-Roman church would seek to neuter that firebrand, whoever in fact he was.

Bow Wow Here Now

2009-10-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

I love puppies but I don't seek to emulate them.

So many people seem to be members of the cult of Now. "Just be here/now, don't analyze it, just focus on what you are doing now."

I will be happy to admit that a lot of people worry and stress too much about stuff, especially when that stuff is essentially B/S. I do not doubt that many people need a prescription dose of here/now. As a central mode of your existence, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Dogs are far more here/now than you can ever hope to be. Their attunement to the world is greater than yours will ever be. Their sense of smell makes your sense of smell look like a blind man with a cane as versus Superman's X-Ray vision. A dog's sight is different from Man's, not better or worse but better or worse in some categories. A dog's hearing however blows Man's away, they can hear sounds above your range, they can track the location of sounds faster, and they can hear sounds at four times the distance of a human being.

Cats, my favorite animal, are among the most sensitive of all beings in terms of sensitivity to environment. Their sense of smell is only a bit less than dogs and still blows humans away, their vision is outstanding (although color-blind). They can see in the dark, they can hear better than either dogs or humans, and their whiskers not only detect if something touches them, but can also detect the motion of nearby objects through the air currents which such objects create.

Dogs and cats are naturally here/now, they don't have a choice. According to a sort of Zen buddhist philosophy, dogs are already enlightened, a statement which I think at least some Zen buddhists would agree with. I do not however want to be a dog. I do not consider that to be something worthy of aspiration.

In terms of basic perennial human existence, I have experienced all of it. I do not have to be in love, to know what being in love is like. I do not have to be in suffering now, to know what it is like to suffer. I have been near death, I have been a sliver away from death. A whisper away from it. I have been about as close to death as anyone can be and still be conscious of it. I do not have to be dying at the moment, to know what dying is like.

My reason tells me the basic parameters of what is going on in the world even if I do not see it myself. To ignore the suffering of others, even the suffering of others I cannot see, is not wisdom. It is selfishness. To ignore the lessons Life has taught you through the past is not wisdom, it is foolishness. To accept life unreflectively is not enlightenment, it is darkness.

When someone does not take their job seriously, we call them irresponsible and short-sighted. When they do not take life seriously, we call them fun and zen-like. When someone blows off their mortgage payment, we call them stupid and a slacker. But if they blow off life, if they blow off understanding it and taking it seriously, we call them free-spirited and immediate.

I can understand this philosophy taking root in the drug-induced sixties and seventies. Cop-outs are always a favorite, and that is what it is, a cop-out. It is throwing up your hands because you give up on thinking. I understand that thinking is inconvenient and frustrating. I understand that a what-me-worry Alfred E. Neumann philosophy feels much better for a lot of people. I just refuse to accept that as an operating principle in any life seriously lived.

Beyond Rules

2009-10-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

St. Paul famously believed that the Jewish Law which, among other things forbade pork and shellfish and required no work (of any kind) on the Sabbath, was superceded by Jesus Christ, which opened up a way for God to enter men's hearts, replacing the written law by the living spirit.

Despite this, you see law- or rule- based activity in various churches all the time. Many Christian interest groups in fact promote various political laws to further their agenda or interests. This despite the fact that they should know from their own Christian history that a law-based way of solving problems is highly ineffective.

An example of rules within churches is fast-days. True, few church these days even have rules for fasting because they are so roundly ignored. They are ignored because nobody really knows, including the church leaders, what they are supposed to be for. The Catholic Church and I think one or more of the Orthodox churches still have meatless Fridays, which is considered a sort of fast.

The Catholic Church has a rule of chastity for priests. Their skills at explaining WHY this is, leave a little to be desired I think. I can imagine those priests thinking, "so if I become a priest, I am not supposed to have sex, like, ever again, and WHY EXACTLY? Sacrifice my what to who? WTF???" There is in fact a reason for the chastity, but they've forgotten the reason, and all they have left is the rule.

The letter kills, the spirit gives life. But we insist on the letters because it makes everything easy. Well it was not supposed to be easy, it was supposed to be good. The thing we do to make things easy are actually cop-outs so that we do not actually have to follow the Spirit and get changed in our hearts. First we ignore in our spirits and obey in our bodies, then we no longer obey in our bodies.

If you fast because of days on a calendar and that is the only reason, your fasting is for nothing. If you fast because church authorities told you so, you fast for nothing. If you fast because you are afraid of not appearing good or obedient, you fast for nothing.

How do you fast? First of all, what does fasting represent? NOT sacrifice, Jesus' sacrifice put an end to all sacrifices to God. You aren't supposed to be doing it for God, as if God needs anything. You are supposed to be doing it for you, to help you grow more Christlike.

So what does fasting represent? Same thing as the old sackcloth and ashes. Remorse. Repentance. Lamentation. The desire to chasten your own soul so as to overcome your weaknesses to sin. Sadness at the world. Should you do this when you are told to? No. Should you do this because your own intellect decides you should? No.

When do you do it then? You do it when you are as hungry for fasting as other people are hungry for food.

When God's spirit within you makes you desire to do it. You cannot lie to God and say you lament either your own actions or inaction or the condition of the world when you in fact really do not. You are lying to yourself, not God. When you are as hungry for fasting as other people are hungry for food, on that day you will fast

This principle is widely applicable in almost all workings of the Spirit. Suppose you have a bad habit of lying? You will change when you are more hungry for the Truth than you ever were for lies.

Now, this next one is a tough one. I cannot claim to be there yet at all. Jesus' teachings on nonviolence have confused and infuriated people since his own day. If someone does something bad to you, really bad to you, intentionally, the normal human reaction is to hurt them back. If someone hurts or kills members of your family, the natural tendency is to want to get a gun and go turn large areas of their body into hamburger meat. You want them to suffer. You want to put the hurt on. So when can you embrace Jesus teachings of not confronting an evil person and turning the other cheek? When your desire to forgive and be forgiven exceeds your desire for revenge. That for me is a hard one, I haven't gotten my head all the way around that one yet, but I am certain that if one day I do, it will be because my understanding and my spirit has changed to the point where I want peace and forgiveness more than I want revenge and hatred, however justified in men's eyes.

Look at the principle of chastity as formulated into a rule by the Catholics. As rules go, no rule could be as onerous as this one. No wife, no girlfriend, and whacking in the vestibule is discouraged. For the average person it is like cruel and unusual punishment, especially if you take it as a rule enforced by glum-looking men in collars, full of fire and damnation.

Peel away the thousand-plus years of men in collars shaking fingers at mortified horny people. Forget about it. Peel away a hundred-plus years of the overblown status of sex in Western Civilization, which was no doubt partly because of the men shaking fingers. What is the heart of chastity?

It is NOT sacrifice. You are not sacrificing your sexuality to God as if he needs the mojo for something else. Again, the sacrifice ethic should be right out the window from the time Paul set us straight. You are not giving something to God. God is giving something to you.

Granted, 99% of people, maybe 99.9% of people, are never going to be able or want to go there, and that is the way it is. But the meaning of chastity is not that you are depriving yourself of something. If you are doing it for the right reasons, you are practicing chastity because you know the truth. To use the old cliche, its better than sex.

St. Paul who was celibate, partially hit on the reason for it, but there is more than that. He said that a man who is married is sort of a slave to his family or at least his loyalties are divided, whereas a celibate man can be wholly devoted to God and doing God's business. That is true, but there is more. Pure love is agape love, but married love is impure. It is maybe one part agape love with two parts something else. There are inevitable entanglements of possessiveness and codependency. If agape love is shunned, the reaction is usually concern, sadness and forgiveness. If married love is shunned, the reaction is more likely anger and jealousy. Married love is inevitably selfish to varying degrees. Agape love is not selfish. Married love has demands and gives ultimatums: agape love does not make demands. Romantic love often deranges the mind, agape love enlarges the spirit.

If you decide to leave love out of the picture altogether and just sleep around, then you are using a human being, a potential child of God, as your sex toy. It's abominable, even if they want to use you as their sex toy.

Married love tends to suck all the agape love out of the room, so to speak. Agape love is not threatened or reduced by how many people it is spread out among, but married love DOES feel threatened if love is shared.

There is yet another matter. Jesus said that in heaven, we will not marry, we will be like the angels in heaven. In other words, married love and romantic love are purely a phenomenon of this world, whereas agape love is not. Well frankly I don't want to wait for heaven, I want to be as much like that angel as I can right now. Chastity is beautiful, rational and pure: sex is degrading, irrational and impure. It is possible to have a love just of the purity of chastity alone.

Like I said, 99% of people are in no way ever going to go there. If you are part of the 1% or the .1%, when should you decide to embrace chastity?

When you desire chastity more than other people desire sex.

So laws and rules are bad substitutes that can never change men's hearts. Seek the truth behind the rule, seek understanding not just obedience. God does not want an obedient robot who does well at following rules, God does not want you to obey with your body but resist with your spirit.

God wants your heart. God wants your spirit and His to come into unity. A robot can be reprogrammed, its understanding is shallow, but if your heart has understanding, you will resist everything that gets in the way of your progress towards God, because what is set in the heart and the spirit is as set in stone.

Oh Lord Give Comfort...

2009-10-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

Oh Lord, give comfort to your people
In a cold and lonely place where there is no love

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in the Desert of the World

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in the place where truth is hated

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in the place where man subjugates man

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in the Wal-Mart of the real

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in the frozen belly of the State

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in the underpasses and crack dens

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in the place where sick grandmothers are tossed into the street

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
where the word hope is no longer known or mentioned

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
In the halls of the rich where sin broods and hatches like eggs

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
In the machines where souls are ground out

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
sleeping on icy sidewalks

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
in a land without mercy

Oh Lord give comfort to your people
Until it is time to take them home

Matrix of Lies

2009-10-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

Morpheus: Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something.What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Neo: The Matrix?

Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind

-The Matrix

If you are like me, when Morpheus got to this point in the movie I was like, hell yeah, I know exactly what you mean. How do I get out? Give me the red pill.

How disappointed I was when I found out the "truth" was only that everyone was plugged into a giant machine. I was expecting something much more profound. In a sense, I was right to expect it, because up to this point everything Morpheus said was right.

The World, either through design or through the natural evolution of its fallen state, throws all kinds of messages at us about what "life" is supposed to be, how you are supposed to be. If you fall short of these ideals, which everyone does, you are supposed to feel bad or anxious that you are not getting enough of this "life". This is a game designed to hide from us the truth. What is the truth, to quote Pontius Pilate? The truth is that you are a prisoner, and this is the prison.

Surely you have had the feeling, however incoherently you were able to formulate it, that all this is wrong? That this is not the way it was supposed to be? Maybe you saw it in a dream, and felt upon waking that the dream was more real than your life is. That this "life" in fact is the dream, and your wakening life lies elsewhere, as yet unclaimed. If you are trying to exist as the World wants you to exist, this is in fact the truth.

What is "having a life" as the World wants you to see it? Nice house, 2 cars, great job, lots of sex, going out, travel, having lots of money. The number of unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable desires is almost endless. Buy a jet-ski. Nude beaches. Would you like some 12 year old scotch? Maybe, like that French official, buy sex from boys in Thailand.

And of course, if you are not able to do all these things as the vast majority of people are not, you can feel bad about yourself which is as much the point of this as anything. To break your spirit. To dangle the carrot and then when you are begging for it, snatch it away. So you are trapped in a vicious cycle of unfulfilled desires, so that you will be pliable and not able to see what a foolishness this is. The world sucks you dry and then leaves you dangling in your empty meaningless life.

To start to get out, it might be helpful to start with something easy. Regard everything the World tells you about how you are supposed to live, as a lie. An evil vile soul-sucking lie designed to keep you imprisoned.

What then is the truth? Unfortunately you will never of yourself be able to know the truth unless God's spirit enters you, and then the truth is that you are a child of the Most High God. Then the truth will be that in Christ, the World is overcome. The truth will be, that you will live forever, long after this world and all its lures crumble into dust.

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

-John 17:3

Recap

2009-10-08T21:08:00.000-07:00

I think it is worth doing a recap of my central issue with orthodox Christianity, which is the Old Testament:

1. If God or "a god" really did tell Moses to commit genocide in the book of Numbers, such a god is not good. Such a god is capable of sin. I would not follow such a god nor his Old Testament, however powerful he was.

2. If Moses made it all up to make it look like God authorized his military agenda, the Old Testament which is based on Moses is not reliable.

3. If Moses was tricked into committing genocide by a demon, the Old Testament is again not reliable.

In summation, either Moses is unreliable (and hence the Old Testament is unreliable) or Moses is reliable, in which case the god of the Old Testament is capable of monstrous evil.

The usual reply to this is, that all Mankind sinned and thus was worthy of death. There were no doubt many 4 or 3 year olds in the Midianite camp: what did they do to deserve death?

The addendum to this is that the Caananites committed abominations such as sacrificing their children to their god. So Moses corrected that by sacrificing them to his god instead?? The god of Moses and the god of the Caananites do the same thing.

Would a God of goodness and mercy tell someone to kill babies? I think we all know in our hearts what the answer is. If there is a "god" of Moses, he is not good and not truly God.

Compare to the truth of the One True God as He speaks through Paul:

If I speak in the tongues of
men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and
all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body
to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient,
love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not
rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection
comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a
child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a
mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope
and love. But the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13

Atheism

2009-10-08T13:53:00.001-07:00

This is the symbol for atheism, not the symbol for Star Trek. No, really.

The most concise refutation of atheism I have ever heard was strangely enough from the movie based on a book from Dan Brown, Angels and Demons. Strangely because Dan Brown is not usually considered terribly friendly to Christianity:

"My religion tends the sick, feeds the hungry, mends the broken, and befriends the unloved. What does your religion do?"

Or in this case, what does atheism do? Not shit really. Well okay they say they encourage rational thought and skeptical thinking and all that. And of course, although they are more discreet in saying so, selfishness.

The problem thus far in atheism's marketing efforts, is that they do not offer much for the whole person. They cater to a niche market of haughty geeks. Their solution is to print out more books from the likes of Dawkins, which are mostly read by... other atheists. They should take a page from Christianity's playbook and really address the whole man:

"Become an atheist, and you can feel okay about your empty pitiful life consisting of chasing after money and cheap sex, possessions, and watching old Star Trek re-runs.

You can feel better than other people by reading atheist publications, secure in the knowledge that at least you aren't one of those ignorant religious types!

Yes, you'll feel swell knowing that you can continue your poor, cubicle-bound existence without any hope or genuine feeling in life, free from any theistic obligations, and that you will wind up in a pine box and that will be the end of you, old chap!"

I think that here we can see the problem with atheism. IT SUCKS.

A more reflective type of atheist (the kind you hardly ever see) might admit that, yes it does suck bad, but is realistic and Christianity isn't. Since faith is given by God not men, I cannot refute such a person (and neither can he refute me). I cannot prove God to someone who does not want to believe in Him. I can only ask him this:

What do you really have to lose?

The kind of life I described above? Is that what you are afraid to lose?

The Sins of the Fathers

2009-10-07T12:37:00.001-07:00

The god of the Old Testament has a way of expressing things that make us feel bad: the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children for many generations. Now to be sure, in places the Old Testament contradicts this, but most importantly this principle is assumed to be the reason why all of us are "kicked out of paradise" because Adam and Eve sinned.

As usual, the god of Moses puts a spin on this that is not exactly accurate. Actually HE was kicked out of Paradise for HIS sin, and we were created by the god of Moses after he fled from heaven.

The sins of the fathers is not properly understood as a moral principle. It is rather a fact of nature, like gravity. Neither we nor Mo'god can prevent it.

Imagine the child of some impoverished woman in the Third World. This woman perhaps has to work 12 hours a day in some grimy factory, her child perhaps under her feet playing on the dirty floor between some dangerous machinery. This child has no opportunity for intellectual enrichment, no opportunity to go to school, indeed is on the level of basic survival. This child did nothing wrong to be in such a state, nor did her parents, they are merely the latest in a long line of broken bodies and shattered dreams, indeed to the point where no dreams are even dreamt anymore. Perhaps at some point some ancestor made bad decisions, or perhaps they were subjugated by some other people, or perhaps even their environment deprived them. There is no point in asking Eskimos to make pottery, for instance - any clay that they might have is under ice, and there is no wood for fire to bake the clay.

We can also make decisions which will impoverish our descendants, and they did nothing wrong to cause this except to have bad ancestors.

This is quite our state on a cosmic level as well - we were born into this world, and into this society, and it cannot be otherwise. We were born into a world of sin, and most of us, if Matthew 7:13-14 is to be believed, won't be leaving it anytime soon.

There is a loophole however. The impoverished child can have a sponsor, one who is rich who will see to it that they get nutritious food and schooling. The child of sin can seek the grace of God.

I Am Not A Gnostic

2009-10-06T09:47:00.001-07:00

Some dude sticking his head out of the world through a crack.

Some acute student of early Christianity might say, "Well you are a gnostic." What I am saying has a very superficial resemblance to gnosticism in one respect, but in other respects not at all.

Where gnostics and I would agree is, we both agree that the world is not a very good place in a lot of respects. We would agree that since a tree is known by its fruit, a fallen world indicates a fallen creator. So that the creator of this world is not truly God, but a sort of demigod.

At that point all resemblance stops. Here are a few differences between myself and gnostics.

INNATE SPARK: Gnostics believe that we, or rather they (some people not all) have an innate fragment of God's spirit already present when they were born. Or rather reborn, since most Gnostics believe in reincarnation.

In fact there are three kinds of people according to the gnostics. There are the hylics, who have none of God's spirit in them and are totally consumed with the world: the psychics who live mostly in their minds, and the pneumatics who have the spark thingie.

This is clearly not compatible with the description in John, which says that all of us are born of the world originally and must be born a second time, of the spirit, in order to enter heaven. This is also in contradiction to the passages which state that God's spirit comes to dwell and live in people, and that it is through Christ alone (by way of the second birth that God gives us through Christ) that we are saved.

ELITISM: Gnosticism is a very elitist religion on several levels:

1. Gnostics deny that God takes an active role in rescuing people, and that one must in fact be saved by one's own effort or knowledge. In other words, all the little sparks must swim upstream to God by their own efforts. Sorta like spawning salmon. :) This is contrary not only to virtually everything Paul ever wrote, but to the gospels as well, where God's action not Man's is what is important.

2. Gnostics say that you can only be saved by special knowledge that is not given to the "masses". How can you get this special knowledge? Become a gnostic of course. ;)

3. Gnostics deny the ontological equality of all people, saying that only their people are "spiritual"and that everyone else are materialistic dogs or even materialistic robots, lacking any sort of soul.

This aspect of gnosticism is in some ways the most disturbing. Jesus, who had every reason to be an elitist, was anything but, and constantly emphasized the need to be humble and lowly of heart - to love everyone as yourself, and to serve others.

To the gnostics, these others are mostly of no worth since they have no divine spark - they are only animated meat-blobs.

I don't have words to express how contemptible this elitist philosophy is. It is spiritual materialism. It is the idea that the realm of spirit can be placed at the service of the ego. It is evil.

NO ETHICS: Since knowledge alone is what is required to be saved, whether you are good or not is more or less irrelevant. Compassion is not required.

MATTER/THE DEMIURGE IS TOTALLY EVIL: The demiurge is what gnostics call the god of this world. Gnostics as a rule do not consider this world or the god of this world to be merely fallen, merely imperfect, or only kind of bad. They consider it absolutely completely satanically evil. You only have to imagine Ted Bundy or Charles Manson as the deity of this world, to know things could be much, much worse than they are.

NO FAITH: Since it is knowledge that is required according to the gnostics, faith has no part in their beliefs.

NO RELATIONSHIP: According to gnostics, you do not exactly have a relationship with God so much as realize that "you are god". The true God is so remote that he has little or nothing to do with this reality or anyone in it.

It should be clear from the previous entries that I am not a gnostic nor do I have much love for gnosticism, despite a slight surface similarity. There may however have been groups which have been lumped into gnosticism by orthodox Christianity with which I have some similarity, as even Marcion has been lumped with the gnostics by orthodox Christians.

A letter from God to Mo'god

2009-10-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

18 Nisan AD 33 your time

From: Your Father

To: Mo'god
Temple Mount
Jerusalem, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe.

My dear son,

It is said among your people that the name "Nazareth" is synonymous with "despised". According to your own law, a man who is left to hang on a tree is accursed by God. According to your own law, those who sin will die, not those who are without sin.

By your own words you have committed an injustice by allowing my adopted child Jesus of Nazareth, who did not sin, to hang on a tree. You have accursed one who did not deserve it. My child.

Your own priests killed my Son.

By your own law, you are guilty. By your own law, you are condemned.

So the perfect freedom of action I afforded you before, I restrict in this sense: I am going to take a people for myself out of the people of the Earth. Out of those who desire righteousness. They will be my people and yours no longer. My Spirit will come down and dwell with them. And you will not stop me.

Love,

God

Rich and Poor

2009-10-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

If this happens to be your "house" (although house seems hardly a fitting term, more like palace), then my apologies in advance for using it as an example. You may even take it as a compliment of sorts that I was appalled at the obscene wealth that it represents.

I happened to be aimlessly browsing through Google Maps and happened on this residence:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=dallas+tx&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=51.089971,82.96875&ie=UTF8&ll=32.829215,-96.803638&spn=0.00167,0.002532&t=h&z=19

It happens to be around two football fields long, just shy of the length of an Iowa class battleship. It's within walking distance of the Dallas Country Club, which was a hub for what used to be the invisible government of Dallas. Which is to say, Dallas elected mayors and city council and so on like any other city, but really in truth it was run by a clique of powerful businessmen, no matter who was in office. Dallas was arguably far better served by that set of plutocrats than, say, the powers who ran Detroit which is now practically a city in ruins. Dallas was probably better served in general then than now, but that was a different age in many ways.

As you might be able to see from the picture, the mansion has what looks like an extensive culinary garden and greenhouse, several formal ornamental gardens in the style of Versailles, a pool and pool house, and what is either a guest house or a very large car garage. There is also a parklike lawn leading down to the edge of a small lake. Not Neverland Ranch, but nice digs by anyone's standards. Maintenence on the gardens and lawns by themselves must entail a significant expense. Formal ornamental gardens don't prune themselves. If there was nothing on the land at all, the value of this property would be enormous, lying as it does in one of the most desireable neighborhoods in Dallas. For the property as it is now, I would pull an estimate out of thin air and say that it is worth at least 50 million dollars. If it is not, rest assured that there exist properties worth far more than that, a hundred million dollars and beyond.

What good could you do with a hundred million dollars? What kind of major lasting social change for the good could you create?

Could you create a fuel efficient, low emissions car for 2 passengers that costs under $4000? I bet we could, if the people with the money really wanted to.

Could you create a housing development designed around low resource waste, low heating/cooling bills, low maintenence and affordability? I am sure it is possible.

Could you drill wells and provide clean drinking water to large areas of Africa, even whole countries? So that the people there don't have to walk 10 miles carrying a water can every day? I bet it can be done.

So are a lot of rich people going out and doing these things? Of course not.

You don't get rich by being philanthropic. You get rich by being mercenary. You get rich by being evil. You get rich by screwing the other guy. In the language of the streets, you make them your bitch. That is how you get rich. Bill Gates, who seems to have gotten religion lately and is giving away much of his money, did he get his money by innovating more than his competitors? By putting out a better product than his competitors? Not really, he got rich from stealing from his competitors and getting away with it. He stole the windowed graphical user interface (Windows) from Apple, stole the browser from Netscape and Mosaic, stole tabbed browsing from Firefox - Microsoft has hardly ever had an original idea. Now Microsoft is jumping all over itself to steal search engine market share from Google which Google arguably rightly earned by being better than anything else. Did they give a damn about search engines before Google? Hell no. Did they care about upgrading Internet Explorer before Firefox? Hell no. They don't have an original idea in their geeky little heads. They know how to make money, however.

So if we do not see the rich pitching in to help solve social and technical problems, what in fact do we see? Well, we don't see much of anyone helping. We see things on almost every level getting worse than they were in 1965. Our school education levels are plummeting, our economy is tanking, the poor are getting poorer, the streets more dangerous, the national government more self-interested and indecisive, society more rude, industrial infrastructure almost destroyed, bipartisanship less possible, political debate more polarized, consensus more elusive. We are on the verge of being a third world country.

What are the roots of many of these things? Excessive love of self and excessive love of money. Too many teachers are more interested in the teachers union than teaching kids. Too many businessmen don't care about building things or solving problems, they care about playing games with money. Or just finding ways to rip people off. Too many politicians are more concerned with pleasing privileged interests and financing their re-election than working for the people. Too many people in city government are lining their pockets instead of doing public service. Too many scientists find it easier to come up with bogus studies on whether vienna sausages contribute to cancer and get the grant money than to do research that needs doing.

The dichotomy is clear. Love of self and money and power, or love of truth and honorableness and service. To be certain the rich get rich, on the whole, by being mercenary, but society as a whole seems to have taken after their ways.

It is not for their wealth alone that the rich stand condemned but for what they do. And if we do the same things, if we live the same values, we deserve the same condemnation. Regardless of whether we are rich or not. Some of the most mercenary values I have ever seen have been among people who were not rich, because in their hearts they commit the same sins. Gangsters and players, rappers and dealers, they are the same in their hearts as Rockefellers and Rothchilds because they love money more than God.

Just remember the old saying about camels and needles and the eyes thereof....

Even Doonesbury gets it :)

2009-10-01T01:58:00.000-07:00

The Seed

2009-09-30T14:34:00.000-07:00

At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.
-Matthew 22:30

What is eternal life? Will we walk around eating cheeseburgers and pooping and doing crossword puzzles like we do here in this life?

As I mentioned before, I believe the Father is alien to this world. The world is matter, the Father is spirit. The seed that the Father puts in us to allow us to be His children and have eternal life, is also spirit. Material birth is not sufficient, you have to be born from above.

In such a way, we will also be spirit in heaven. Jesus said that we will be like the angels, and angels are spirit. There is no material resurrection, no cheeseburgers or sex in heaven. ;) If I am anything near right in understanding a fraction of what that Life will be like, you won't miss them.

How do you get eternal life? Well, in a superficial sense, you get it from believing in Jesus and the Father - but merely having intellectual assent to a proposition is not what is required. Believing opens the door to knowing, and knowing the One True God and Jesus Christ who He sent is an outward sign of an inward deposit of God's spirit, which allows you to be God's child.

This knowing is solely the action of God, you can close yourself off from it but you cannot bring it on by desiring it or working for it. God has to rescue you, you cannot rescue yourself. We are born completely saturated and of a piece with the world of Mo'god, it is no more possible to be saved by your own effort than for an atom of lead to become an atom of helium by its own effort. These are two completely different realms - you are born a part of one and not a part of the other. You have to be born a second time of the Spirit in order to rise above this world.

Now the Gnostics say, some people are born with a piece of the divine spark in them while others don't, and so those sparky people get saved while the others do not. I do not believe this myself, although I would be compelled not to believe it even if it were true because it smacks of hubris. But this is of a whole with the gnostic theory that God is sort of oblivious to what is going on down here, and we have to get back to Him of our own effort. Guided by that spark thing.

I know that God actively intervenes to bring His own to him, and I do not believe that being one of God's own is a matter of "knowing our cozmic selves" or "knowing that we are god" (which as pertains to our inherent nature is a manifest falsehood). Its a matter of God having mercy on us. The only action we can take ourselves is to prepare the way, make ourselves like John the Baptist: "He must increase, and I must decrease."

Do we just get eternal life when we die? Quite the contrary, Jesus says that the true Christian has it now. In other words, we already have God's spirit in us, and the life eternal is spirit. We also have the life of the body which will die, and the full parameters of our eternal existence have not manifested themselves because we have this body, but it is there nevertheless.

Smile

2009-09-29T19:42:00.001-07:00

I may seem to emphasize a lot how bad the world is. And it is bad. It is a horrorshow.

(cue Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now: "The horror.... the horror....")

No, really, it is. I was walking into a grocery store on Sunday and saw a man whose face was so disfigured that I couldn't look at him. His face was like the face out of a nightmare. Imagine waking up every morning, going to the mirror to brush your teeth, and seeing a face like something out of a Tool music video. Imagine the children laughing at you, or running in terror. Imagine the shock and averted eyes as you go about your daily life, doing such things as... shopping at a grocery store. You begin thinking that everyone who laughs, laughs at you.

Or think about poor Steven Hawkings. Ya, he might be the most brilliant man on earth, but being the most brilliant man on earth might not mean much when you cannot feed yourself or wipe your own bottom. He must get itches on his nose that would drive normal men insane.

So you might think to yourself, why would anyone have a belief in God that would require him to not simply acknowledge these things, but stare them in the face? I talk about these things, and I talk to myself about these things, because I want everyone (including me) to never forget: the world is a horrorshow. Straight up.

The purpose of this post today however is really to tell you about joy.

Yes, joy.

The people of the World have to have a practical reason to have joy. They just got a big tax refund from the IRS. They're going to get laid tonight. They just got the big job. They are doing something fun.

I don't have to have a reason, I have joy for no reason at all. I have joy because I feel the Father smiling. I have joy despite the World. In my life I have had such joy from my Father that I wouldn't trade for anything else in the world. For no reason at all, except that the grace of the Father has picked that moment to shine on me. It is a foretaste of the bliss of paradise. I would not sell that joy if the entire world was put on the plate. When you release your hope in the world and put your hope on God, you can be open to the things the Father wants to give you. One of which is joy.

Now there are seasons in life with God the same as there are in everything else. There are times of consolation and times of tribulation. But I don't want you to accept the horror that is the World because I want you to be sad. I want you to accept it so you can be happy.

The Gate

2009-09-24T20:48:00.000-07:00

My new video. Warning, some graphic images of human suffering.

Pure

2009-09-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

Many Christians, as have I, had questions as to how a pure, holy God could have done all the horrible things god is supposed to have done in the Old Testament. To be sure, the Israelites did these things, and to be sure, they did them in the name of their god.

However you explain such things, they are for certain not actions of the God I know and love. The highest God in heaven, The Holiest and Kindest, Most Merciful, does not do these things.

Many Christians, as have I, have questioned how a good God could send people to hell. I do in fact believe that there is a god of this world that sends people to hell, that would be sending pretty much all of us to hell in fact were it not for the intrusion of the One True God into this scheme of things.

The True God only wishes to save, but we are not naturally of His dimension of things. He is alien to this world system and alien to sin and lies. Seeing our suffering however, he found a way to enable us to escape our prison through the Lord Jesus. Through the Lord Jesus, we can escape this world system. Otherwise, we are still trapped in it, and subject to the judgement of another being (Mo'god). The Lord of Light seeks to unlock us from our prison, but we still have to walk through the door (Jesus, the Gate).

Many Christians, as have I, have wondered how a good God could have created a world so full of suffering. The traditional answer has been that we caused it to be bad. Really? We caused brain cancer and tsunamis? Volcanic eruptions? We're more powerful than I thought.

In truth my God did not create the world. He does not control it now. He is from another place altogether.

I believe that the True God created a being once, and gave him every perfection. Freedom to choose is a perfection, although it is not perfect if it is used to separate from God. This being, Mo'god (god of Moses), did choose to separate and create this world. His freedom to choose is the cause of all evil in existence, although it is not in itself evil.

The Lord, the God in whom I trust, is pure. He is clean. He is holy beyond our possible imagining. He is free from sin. God has never sinned and never will, because sin is antithetical to His nature. He only wants good things for us. He is benevolent and loving. Although being the most powerful entity in existence, he does not lord it over us but he has tender concern for the living creatures on this world. He took Jesus as His own Son and used him to open a way for us to be free. The crucifixion is in fact the beginning of the defeat of the god of this world - a way through to God has been punctured into this world of tears by Jesus' sacrifice.

You may wonder, as I have, why God does not intervene when bad things happen to us, when a loved one dies, when we get sick or are abused. A human body is the possession of Mo'god and must obey Mo'god's rules. You cannot leave this realm in a normal body. The people who have left here to go to the Perfection do not have material bodies in our sense of the word and will not ever again. They will never again suffer sickness or grief, God will wipe every tear from the eyes of their souls.

God is pure. Whenever you hear of god doing bad things, it cannot be God, the true God, who does them.

Marcion

2009-09-23T11:00:00.001-07:00

Marcion of Sinope was a shipbuilder

Marcion of Sinope (circa 85-160 AD) was a shipbuilder. He like many Christians after him had a hard time reconciling the wrathful god of the Old Testament to the God of Jesus. His solution was audaciously simple: they weren't the same God.

To Marcion, unlike the Gnostics after him, the god of the Old Testament was not pure evil nor was his universe pure evil. The OT god was much like us in many ways, he had... emotional problems. To his credit, he did insist on justice within the Jewish community, but these alone were his people and anyone else could get screwed, pretty much. So the god of the Old Testament wasn't Satan (although Satan apparently is one of his employees according to the book of Job).

Because Marcion didn't want God to even have the taint of having created the god of Moses (Mo'god), he said that the true God of Jesus was from some completely alien dimension of sorts from this one, and that Mo'god didn't even know of the existence of the God of Jesus.

Proto-orthodox Christians called Christ "Christ", which means annointed one (king). This was in line with Jewish expectation of a messiah who would rule Israel and shake off her oppressors. Marcion said that this messiah, the one of Jewish expectation, had not come and was not Jesus. The gospels and epistles had been written in Greek which at that time did not use vowels. So Christ was "CHRST". The proto-orthodox assumed an "i" as the missing vowel, Marcion assumed an "e", so for the proto-orthodox Jesus was the "Christ", to Marcion Jesus was the "Chrest", which in Greek means "benevolent one". This is why a letter by an early Roman official calls Jesus "Chrestus" when he is complaining about his followers to the government.

Marcion was considered the arch-enemy of the proto-orthodox Christians far and above anyone else. Tertullian wrote not one but five books against him. In fact, nothing of Marcion's own work remains, but so many proto-orthodox and Orthodox (after the council of Nicea) writers wrote against him that we can reconstruct virtually his whole body of work which consists of the book Antithesis and his New Testament, which consisted of a variant of Luke and ten of Paul's epistles. Marcion's effect on the Orthodox group was in fact profound, as he was the first Christian leader to formulate a canon of accepted books (a New Testament) and a distinct theology. This pattern would later be copied by Orthodox Christianity. Marcionite churches spread across Asia Minor, being found in existence as late as 400AD.

Marcion dealt with the issue of Jesus' divinity in a bizarre way, by saying that the appearance of Jesus as a human being was only an appearance, that he was in actuality pure spirit. This led to some difficulty in explaining how pure spirit could be crucified.

Why did Marcion's version of Christianity not survive or become the dominant form? One reason was that Marcion demanded strict celebacy, so much so that those who were married could only be baptized on their death bed. Obviously they didn't breed any followers and had to recruit all they had. Marcion demanded strict morality, the one thing that his opponents couldn't complain about was his ethics. He also believed that martyrdom was not to be shirked, and that anyone who had recanted their belief in order to avoid martyrdom was not to be allowed back in the church. So you have in effect a bunch of non-breeding martyrs, not a recipe for lots of followers. It is amazing considering this that they did last until around 400 AD and are suspected of having influenced groups who would go on to be the Anabaptists and the Cathars, and also strangely enough through a circuitous route, the Baptists. Marcion's unsatisfactory explanation of the Crucifixion may also have turned off many followers.

While some lump Marcion with the Gnostics, that is not fair to Marcion. Gnostics believe in secret knowledge, while Marcion believed that the Gospel and writings of Paul, who he regarded as the apostle who knew Jesus' message the best, were sufficient. Gnostics have a byzantine cosmology to explain how the good God could have ended up with a defective Earth - Marcion split that up by saying simply that there were two deities.

I totally agree with Marcion about the god of Moses (who I abbreviate as Mo'god) not being the same as Jesus' Father, although I differ with him on how all that works out.

Moses and his god

2009-09-22T16:40:00.000-07:00

Behold... the Hand of Mo'god

Moses was unmistakeably one of the most brilliant men who ever lived, despite his facade of being an inarticulate country boy. As a military commander, he ranks with the best ever - a General Robert E. Lee, a Caesar. His understanding of his fighting men and their psychology was profound.

Moses took a ragtag band of some soldier-types and some regular folks, women and children, and beat them into one of the most efficient fighting forces in history. This group captured several fortified cities, wiped out several tribes and city-states, and struck fear into a whole region. He was the boogey man for generations of Canaanites - no doubt Canaanite mothers told their children to eat their vegetables or the Hebrews would get them.

The question thus arises: did Moses invent his god to whip his people into shape, or did that god whip his people into shape through Moses?

I would suspect the former except for this reason:

If you don't believe in God, then there is no problem with the fact that the world contains great suffering, evil, sickness and death. It is what it is. If you DO believe in God however, you have to explain how this screwed-up world is the product of a good God. This is often explained as the Fall, but why would the fall of human beings create the fall of an entire universe? This presumes that the universe existed before the Fall, at which time it must have been quite different. Good luck finding that in the fossil record.

There was a Fall, yes. It was not however our Fall, but the Fall of a powerful being who then created our universe. A being who had the freedom to choose, and chose to part ways with God. Being fallen, this entity could not create a perfect universe - no doubt he did the best he could. Mo'god caused us to be evolved in imitation of the true God who created celestial beings like Mo'god himself. We are evolved in Mo'god's image, to be to Mo'god what Mo'god once was to God. This is why Mo'god is always pissed at us - turns out we are chips off the old block and tend to obey Mo'god as little as Mo'god obeyed God.

The true God no doubt exercised His prerogative as God by allowing Mo'god to freely choose to rebel for his own purposes which would wind up being what God wanted to happen. God no doubt foresaw and intended all this to happen as it did, but Mo'god nevertheless chose to do it out of his own free will. It's tough to outwit God. This world is useful because it creates the opportunity for us to work at following God rather than being born into a state of sinless grace. To not only choose God but work and sacrifice to follow God. It is Mo'god rather than God however who is the architect of this universe.

In our natural state, it is perhaps more accurate to call Mo'god our god than God. This is why we are born in sin (according to the Law), under the authority of Mo'god, and must be reborn in the spirit (of the true God).

For those who have no experience of God, the easiest explanation of why things are bad is, shit happens period. The universe is what it is. I do have experience of God every day, so I don't ascribe to this simple hypothesis.

Who is God?

2009-09-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

Who is God (as versus Mo'god, the god of Moses)? Short answer is that God is God as revealed by Jesus:

God is completely perfect in every way
God requires nothing nor can anything be taken away from God
God's love for you is completely irrespective of your merit to be loved. He loves in this way because pure love is in His nature
God's nature is completely antithetical to sin, evil, and lies. Sin is inherent in the way Mo'god made you. Therefore you cannot become united with Him unless a means of removing your sin is possible.
God can adopt you through Christ, who did not sin. You can accept a new spirit in you from God, as versus the spirit given you by Mo'god. This spirit dwells in you and makes you hate sin. Not that you will ever be sinless on this Earth, but you will enter into a process of purification. The spirit given by God contends with the spirit given by Mo'god.
God is willing to give you far more than you can understand now. God does not operate on the reciprocity that humans operate on, but gives abundantly because it is His nature as the source of all that is to do so.

The person who is the recipient of God's spirit must work on this relationship, or risk losing that connection to God. It is not possible for any of us to be perfect, but you must desire to improve that relationship and to oppose sin. The person who loves God will try to be:

Truthful, because God's word is truth
Merciful, because God is merciful to you
Pure
Impartial (Jesus said that his mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it, so he didn't even show partiality to his own earthly family).
Giving
Loving because God is love
Separated from worldly desires (1 John, "do not love the world or anything in the world") and lusts.
Faithful, first to God and secondly in human relationships
Hopeful, knowing that our sufferings in this world are transient and worthless compared to what the Father desires to give us.

You should desire to be submitted to God at the expense of everything else whatsoever. Metaphorically speaking, if your eye causes you to sin, get rid of it. Where people are at relative to their ability to do this varies, it is not an easy thing.

Who is Jesus?

2009-09-22T03:13:00.000-07:00

The short answer of course is, "Jesus is God's son". What does that mean, exactly?

Jesus had to be fully human in order to be a satisfactory substitute for Man on the cross. Jesus also had to be fully God in order for his "I Am" statements in John to be correct. How do we reconcile this?

First lets take the baptism. If Jesus was God, why on Earth would he need to be baptised? He wouldn't. I propose that this is what happened:

Jesus was born fully human but did not sin

At his baptism, God the Father adopted him. Hebrews and Acts quote this passage from the Psalms:

"You are my Son. Today I have become your Father."

At that time or shortly after, God fully occupied Jesus with Jesus' permission. In other words, from that moment on, everything that Jesus said or did was in fact done by God. When you were talking with Jesus, you were talking with the Father. This explains how Jesus could say that he was subordinate to the Father and yet also was the Father. Jesus the human being was subordinate: Jesus as one completely controlled by God was God.

This also clarifies a curious statement by Jesus that "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the pharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of God". I had always taken that as a slap at the pharisees, to say they weren't very righteous, but as of that moment it was correct. The Law was still in effect, and unless you could obey the Law, which no man before Jesus could do, you were under judgement.

This also explains how Jesus could say, "not one jot or tittle of the Law will pass away, until all is fulfilled". What would be fulfilled, is Jesus' crucifixion, which had not happened yet.

In order to satisfy Mo'gods requirement that only a man could make the required sacrifice, God left Jesus when he was crucified. This is how Jesus could say, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" on the cross. At that moment, he was only a man. It is impossible for God to die. Jesus truly did die, but since he had not sinned, death could not hold him according to the Law of Mo'god (all those who sin will die) and he ascended into heaven and then reappeared on Earth to his disciples.

So in summation:

Jesus was born a human being and died a human being. It is impossible for God to die.
Jesus became fully united and subordinated to God at his baptism or shortly thereafter
Jesus as occupied by God spoke and did only as commanded by God. To hear Jesus speak was in fact to hear God speak.
Jesus died a fully human being
Jesus' death had to require certain legalistic requirements of Mo'god in order to be the sinless death required. This is why Jesus often speaks of things being "so that the scriptures are fulfilled".
Jesus is united to God but is not equal with God. As an example, my hand is united to me because it does what I will, but it is not equal to me. We likewise who are saved are united to God through Jesus and are also adopted by God as His children, but we are not equal to God.
Jesus died in order to pay the debt which mankind owed to Mo'god, not because mankind owed a debt to the Father. Otherwise the Father would be repaying Himself the debt to Himself, which is nonsensical. Moreover the Father does not record debts or care about how much you owe Him.

We do not know that much about the Spirit, but I think it is reasonable to assume that the Spirit like Jesus is a messenger, a conveyer of God's spirit and such is part of God, united to God, but not precisely equal to God.

Mo'god might have been a being such as this at one point, but had freedom of will and chose disunity with God. God allowed him to go his own way and even create the Universe, but then had pity on the poor beings within Mo'god's universe and intervened. Mo'god is already condemned (John 16:11) by virtue of the original fact of his separation from the one true God. Mo'god's universe will either gradually wind down by itself because of its imperfection (entropy, heat death of the universe), or be put to an end by God.

The Father From Heaven

2009-09-22T00:13:00.001-07:00

People who have been following my first Christian blog would know me as a fairly orthodox Christian. Well, things have been happening to me very quickly over the last couple weeks, to the point where that label does not exactly apply. Many if not most of the concerns that I always had still remain, but things have jelled that were problematic to me before. The change came about primarily through meditating on this question:

Was the God of Moses the same as God, Jesus' Father?

It is clear to me that the God of Moses, if the Old Testament is to be believed, did things that according to any decent standard of conduct were absolutely horrific. War crimes, genocide, the killing of helpless woman and child captives that had their hands tied behind their backs. The God of Moses ordered Moses and Joshua to capture cities and to destroy every living thing in them, even babies, even livestock. The God of Moses deceived people, put evil spirits into them (as God did to Saul to make him hate David), and teaches people to celebrate His mass murder of infants (the Passover). Jesus' Father is no respecter of persons and accepts anyone who does what is right, but the God of Moses (hereafter referred to as Mo'god) had only one people, the Jews. Mo'god tormented Job to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of Lucifer, who in the book of Job appeared to be an employee of Mo'god, not an enemy. Mo'god hates humanity (in Genesis he repented of making Mankind, which indicates that Mo'god can make mistakes). I could go on, but any sensible person who reads the Old Testament should be able to see examples such as this.

There are two possible answers for the question, who is Mo'god:

1. Mo'god does not exist but was created by Moses
2. Mo'god does truly exist, but is not Jesus' Father

Much as I would be tempted to regard Mo'god as a convenient fiction of the uber-warriors Moses and Joshua, the existence of Mo'god would resolve certain issues, such as the existence of this universe which is far from heavenly.

Jesus said in John: "the ruler of this world now stands condemned." Well, in the very beginning of John, and apparently sort of tacked on to John, is the statement that Jesus created the world. If Jesus created the world, is he not its ruler? Despite this statement tacked onto the beginning of John's gospel, John's evident beliefs on the World are quite the opposite to this.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
-1 John 2:15

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.
-John 15:19

I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.
-John 17:9

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place."
-John 18:36

How then is Jesus the creator of this world! Mo'god is.

In John 19 Jesus says to Pilate,

"You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin."

Who is this "one who handed Him over"who is "from above (a celestial being of some sort)"? Surely not Jesus' Father, because Jesus is saying that he sins, and the Father does not sin. Who else could it be, but Mo'god.

Ask yourself this: if Jesus bought us out of eternal death by his crucifixion, who held the lien on your death? Who had put the price on your head? Was it Jesus' Father? Why would he sacrifice his Son to pay himself back a debt?? Truly the lienholder who sentenced us to death was Mo'god. Otherwise Jesus would be paying for a debt owed to his own Father, at the command of his own Father, which makes no sense at all. The Father through Jesus is paying a debt owed to Mo'god.

So we in truth have one true God and one godlike entity.

Mo'god:

created the world
created Man
does sin
does lie
is just in a certain way, but not kind
is not merciful
is jealous
plays favorites
is not the true God but some lower being than God.

Mo'god is not necessarily out and out completely evil, neither is he good. He is a fallen being like us. The One True God aims to correct Mo'gods mistakes and eventually to take away his power.

You can consider the difference between Mo'god and God as being like the difference between Queen Elizabeth I and Mother Teresa. QE1 was not an evil woman by human standards, was an able ruler who had some care for her subjects, was dedicated to her job. She also killed lots of enemies, was not particularly concerned with fairness or mercy, and certainly was not a saint. Mother Teresa was a saint, saved lives, killed no one, and dispensed mercy her whole life.

Jesus' Father the One True God:

did not create the world
seeks to save but did not create Man
is antithetical to sin
is incapable of deceit
is loving and merciful
is not jealous or vindictive
accepts people from all races and nations
is the one true ultimate God

I will speak on this further in coming days, but in short the God of this world is not the One True God, Jesus' father. Prior to Jesus, the Father made limited or no contact with Mankind. The Father is vastly beyond human understanding, but Mo'god is quite like us in many ways, and we were made in Mo'god's image. We must have a new spirit (i.e. not the one given by Mo'god) placed in us by the Father in order to be saved (born again).

IMPORTANT NOTE:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have since backed off from this dualist position. I now believe that Moses was simply a ruthless military commander who used God as an excuse. The world we are in now, must be as it is and God must permit this certain amount of evil so that we truly have a choice whether to follow God or not. God has allowed this for our good, however little it appears that way sometimes. Nobody receives anything as a result of this life that they have not wished to receive. Those who follow evil get evil, and this is their choice.

God has done this for our benefit, God coerces nobody, although in some cases he may lead strongly, lol. :) He is giving us a right to choose.