Judgment

The world is going horribly wrong. Surely you can see that.

Suicide rates are going through the roof. People who seemingly have everything are bumping themselves off. Why is that happening?

We have some kind of maniac in charge here in the US, but we're not alone. An official after the recent G7 conference described Trump as an incompetent version of Heath Ledger's Joker. But even in such a "civilized" place as Denmark, people are barring the gates and manning the walls. Thinly veiled Nazis are ascendant. Maybe battening down the hatches and hunkering down is not such a bad idea, considering how things are going.

We are destroying the planet and everyone knows it. What, you think you can just keep on doing whatever you want and it will all be okay? We can keep on ripping the tops of mountains off to get at the coal to burn, and it will all still be okay? We can keep consuming resources at unprecedented levels, and nothing will come of it? There will be a reckoning.

Robots and AI will take our jobs soon, eventually all of them. What happens to the people after no one needs employees any more? Machines will also be our soldiers soon, soldiers perfect and without pity. Interesting that millions of people are about to be superfluous at a time when the perfect technology is being developed to kill them.

We are descending into madness and no one can stop it, and no one even really has a plan to. Most honest environmentalists are already accepting that applying moderate and sensible environmental legislation will not stop or even much slow the destruction of the planet. In other words, that even the political best case scenario for saving the planet won't really work well enough.

Hatreds we thought we were well on the way to burying, have risen from the grave and nobody can stop them. You can't stop hate with a bullet. You can't stop it with a law.

The United States has been extraordinarily blessed for the past 70 years. No nation has ever been so successful. We have been so prosperous. But all good things come to an end. The bill finally comes due, for everything we have been doing. We imagined that our particular model of freedom and progress would continue forever, that we would succeed forever, but it was all a lie. We have been living in a dream world. Our dark ghosts are rising from our closets now. Who we really were, all this time, is finally being revealed. The mask has been ripped off the face of Lady Liberty and the visage we gaze into is the visage of madness.

That face has been there all along, but we didn't know.

People can fix a lot of things, but one thing they can't fix is G-d's judgment. G-d's judgment, you have to adapt to what He says. If you don't, even worse things will happen. G-d's judgment cannot be bargained with or pleaded with, you either do exactly what He says to do or the full weight of it comes down on you.

The book of Jeremiah showed us exactly how that works. Jeremiah told the King of Judah that the king of Babylon has been given power to destroy him. Whatever the king of Babylon says to pay as tribute, you suck it up and you pay it, every cent. Otherwise, he is coming down and destroying Jerusalem and you. And G-d will allow it because you are evil and disobedient and have forgotten Him. But he didn't pay, and Babylon destroyed Judah.

What is America, really? The idea that as long as you can pay for it, you can have or do whatever you want. Human willfulness is the essence of America. You want to have your own space program while your employees slave away in un-air-conditioned warehouses under terrible conditions. You can have it, Jeff Bezos, because you have the dough. No G-d watches what you do, Jeff Bezos, as you crush your workers to become the richest man in the world. This is America: those who have the gold make the rules. Are we not the very picture of an empire ripe for G-d's vengeance?

Unless we change and accept the G-d of Sinai and Him alone, denounce the worldly churches who say all is well while everything is burning, denounce the idea that Jesus or anyone or anything else is G-d except G-d, follow the Torah and live according to the Ten Commandments and the other wisdom of G-d, this is only the beginning. 

"They offer healing offhand

for the wounds of My poor people

saying, "All is well, all is well"

when nothing is well.

~Jeremiah 8:11

Only Him

Two blog posts in one day is a bit much, even for me. I am not sure I will want to be doing many more after this however. This may kind of be it for awhile.

I was thinking to myself, "when you fall in love with someone, how do you know you are actually in love with them and not your own image of them?" And of course you do fall in love with your image of them. Over time that image may be changed and improved as you learn more about them, but is it still an image of them rather than them? In some ways at least, it still is.

Then I thought, "how is the love of G-d any different?" Well, in a sense you can love G-d without knowing anything about Him. If you love peace, mercy, truth, justice, you DO love G-d even without knowing him. So then can we keep on loving peace, mercy, justice and the rest and leave off loving Him in any other way?

Well many do. And I am not saying that is wrong: in fact it's pretty right. But let me tell you what IS wrong.

We are. We and the world are. We are ourselves sin.

In Daoism, it is said that you can see the "unity" or else you can see the "ten thousand things." The "ten thousand things" are the multiplicity of stuff in the world. The world as it is, the world as it appears to normal folks. The world of the "ten thousand things" is itself sin because it is itself sundered, fallen from the primordial unity.

If you are a normal person, the idea is that you be a good person and do what is right and that is pretty cool. That's what you are supposed to be. Nobody could ever argue with that.

If you are a weirdo like me however, that might not be enough, that might not satisfy, because you understand that the world - or at least the world to YOU - is sundered. Is Fallen. And nothing else will do but to ultimately cease to see yourself and to cease to see the world, but only see G-d. Even the word "God" goes.

The Sufis are so much better at language for this than anybody else is, though they speak often in terms of romantic love. Which is what I started this post with, the strange difficulty in ever actually knowing the Beloved (human or otherwise.) Do you know them, or do you know your image of them? This also ties into my previous post for today, on idolatry. Do you know Jesus, or just the Bible or that wooden figure on a crucifix? Do you love G-d or just the Tanakh? This is part of the "ten thousand things," the sundering. We are separated from our object, from the object of our inquiry. When you love another person, that person is not us and in many ways is forever unknown to us. Everything is separated. The Ten Thousand Things.

But I see before me a great shining sword to sunder the sundering, to render it whole. To render it whole the only way it could be. "I" passes away, we pass away, the world passes away, and there is left only G-d. Where there is no longer Robert looking at G-d, but only G-d, and Robert is no longer thought of and the world is no longer thought of. And He is there always... in any given moment that could happen. That I forget myself, that I am annihilated yet still live. Dead yet alive. I leave - He stays.

"All things in creation suffer annihilation

and there remains the face of the Lord

in its majesty and bounty."

~Surat-L-Rehman 26-27

Idolatry

When we think about the multiple times in the Tanakh (Old Testament) when idolatry is condemned, when we think of all the prophets and heroes of those ancient times who acted against it, sometimes very violently (Elijah supposedly commanding the death of 800+ Baal and Asherah devotees comes to mind,) we may look at the modern world and think: how is that relevant anymore? Why should I even read this stuff if it only pertains to a world long dead? While there are many adherents of polytheistic religions worldwide, most notably Hinduism, here in America we don't see Asherah poles or statues of the fish-god Dagon on the streetcorners. America is far too secular for any of that. While there are polytheists here too, they usually practice in private. How is this at all a concern anymore?

Unfortunately we don't get off that easy, none of us do. Idolatry is a universal human temptation, and will arise even in people who are devoutly monotheistic or think of themselves as such. Anytime anyone relies on some aspect of religion more than they rely on G-d, even if they rely on that as a way to G-d, they are treading on an idolatry gray zone.

I am going to get this out there and then move on, because this is actually far from the main focus of what I want to say. My goal is not to criticize others but if anything to get myself where I need to be.

That said... Christianity is an idolatrous religion. You have a created being, a man, who is claimed to have been G-d. No man was ever G-d. That's no different than the ancient Egyptian pharaohs claiming to be gods themselves. If Jesus was G-d, then he could not die on the cross because G-d cannot die. G-d is Himself life. If Jesus was a man who died on the cross, then he was just like the millions of other people who died horribly without significantly affecting the salvation of the world. If Jesus was G-d and didn't die however, the cross is in vain because nobody died on it. Either way, salvation is not effected. It is terribly hostile to the core of Mosaic religion to think that any created being whatsoever has ever been or could ever be G-d. In this, the Muslims are right (though wrong about other things.) "Hear O Israel: the Lord our G-d, the Lord is ONE." Not "three-in-one" or any other permutation. Really, it is hard to see how Christianity has been so successful given that it relies on the idea that the Almighty can die, but I guess back in the Roman Empire mercy, love and charity were more persuasive than theology. Which, there is something to that.

Okay, that's out of the way. Okay Jews and Muslims, you're up next. How about the Tanakh, the Talmud or the Quran? Is excessive reliance on either of those potentially idolatrous? Is revering them as holy books beyond the information or knowledge they convey potentially idolatrous?

Yes.

Yes they potentially are. This took me a while to understand. You see, human beings want something they can hold onto, a sure path, something they can rely on. I am absolutely no different, and in a sense there is nothing wrong with that - until there is. At heart I just want a sure path to G-d and not to have to do a great deal of work to get on it. I want something I can hold in my hands and love, something in this world that is reliably holy. But the Tanakh isn't itself holy, G-d is. This is a difficult fate, to love something that I cannot see or touch or even imagine myself doing so. Jesus has a human face, but not G-d. Jesus has human hands, but not G-d. Even the Tanakh, a physical Tanakh book is tangible, but not G-d. If I kiss the Tanakh, I am not kissing G-d, I am kissing dead wood pulp. Nor are the words in it, or ANY words, absolutely reliable. It is a book of wisdom, a book of learning, but that's all it is. Devotion to it can be a means to an end, the end of thoroughly understanding what it says, but that's all.

What then IS reliable? Only G-d Himself. I must place my faith and trust in G-d alone: no book, no symbol, no words however wise or inspiring. Only the impact of His spirit upon mine is what I can trust.

No books, no man, no god, no idol, no words - not even the holiest prayer (which for me is the Shema.) Only G-d alone. I am throwing myself out there and praying that G-d will catch me.

And that's a hard road and always has been and always will be, though the difficulty is all ours.

The Second Commandment

"Thou shalt not make unto thee
a graven image, nor any manner

of likeness, of any thing that is in

heaven above, or that is in the

earth beneath, or that is in the

water under the earth..."

~Exodus 20:4 (emphasis mine)

I'm an artist, so the Second Commandment is very relevant to me. Followers of my blog, if there are any out there, may have noticed that previous blog entries have been illustrated in various ways, usually with one picture at the top but sometimes more. That is no longer the case.

In Christian translations of Exodus, the translation makes it appear that the Second Commandment is solely referring to images of idols for worship. For most people today, that is, or at least appears, to be an unproblematic Commandment. Few people in developed countries overtly worship idols in the sense that people used to bow down to statues of Baal or Asherah or Zeus. Some do, not many. The language in Exodus 20:4-5 in the NIV for instance is softened to:

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything

in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters

below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them

However, in my Hebrew-English transliteration of the Torah, written by people who are transliterating directly from Hebrew Torah scrolls and know Hebrew intimately, there is no such easy out. A more direct and much more clunky translation which is more or less word for word is this:

Not will you do to you sculpture and

any resemblance which in the sky from

upward and which in the land from under and

which in the water from under the land

Clunky, but Hebrew doesn't work like English. The hebrew is this, reading right to left:

לֹא תַעֲשֶׂה לְךָ פֶסֶל וְכָל תְּמוּנָה אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל  וַאֲשֶׁר בָּאָרֶץ מִתָּחַת וַאֲשֶׁר בַּמַּיִם מִתַּחַת לָאָרֶץ

From left to right:

"Not do sculpture all (any) resemblance which sky upward which land under which water under land"

lo  ta'a'seh  lê'kha  phe'sel  wê'khol  tê'mu'nah  a'sher  ba'sha'ma'yim  mi'ma'al  ba'a'rets  mi'ta'hhat  wa'a'sher  ba'ma'yim  mi'ta'hhat  la'a'rets


Many of the conjunctions and adverbs and modifiers that exist in English do not exist in Hebrew and are assumed from the context. In ancient Hebrew there weren't even vowels, consonants were considered stable and fixed whereas vowels were considered active and living. In other words you could say that consonants were nonliving like stone, and vowels were living, and they didn't make marks or symbols for living things even in their language. An interesting word here is tê'mu'nah which directly means species, like a species of animal, but also means likeness. When Genesis says we are made in the image of G-d, the word is tê'mu'nah, likeness, which also means species or type. Which it is extremely hard to see what that likeness is considering the human condition, but there you have it.

Anyway, getting back on point. As an artist, the Second Commandment is very challenging to me, though I have not completely lost hope in making art that does not violate it. Ironically, I always hated abstract art, it's funny in a way. Now if I make art at all, it will have to be abstract to some degree or at least of something unliving.

Why should we regard the Second Commandment as relevant even though we live in an age when very few people overtly bow down to idols of deities? Well the first reason is that modern people absolutely do bow down to idols, they are just different idols. They are in a sense worse idols because people don't perceive them as such. Money, sex, the human figure, success, power, consumption, even technology, these are all modern idols. In the case of technology, in at least one instance it is even named as such: "the Cult of Mac." The religion of Apple, in other words. Look at our advertising: when we see advertising images of sexy bodies or desirable cars or other things, is this not the modern idolatry? It is. The connection of sex to idolatry has very old roots, some ancient pagan religions had temple prostitutes who worked their bodies for their god. Religion with benefits, you might say. ;) Actual art itself, fine art, is a cult of sorts, with people spending millions on what is in actuality only pigment on cloth. People will spend literally millions on any scrap of canvas that Van Gogh for instance might have dabbed some paint on. Ironic considering the difficult economic conditions that Van Gogh found himself in his life.

There is another reason that is not as obvious but is just as important. In the modern world we create entire mental landscapes of things with photographs, we make games and other virtual worlds (the game Skyrim has been described as "a continent in a box,") we build our mental visions with concrete and steel, we are always on the verge of closing ourselves into a landscape of our own making, both externally in the world of cars and parking lots and buildings, and also internally, in our own minds. This clearly is not what G-d had in mind, He wants to turn our focus to the real: in other words, to Himself and His creation. Every minute in the life of a truly G-d-conscious human being can be a direct revelation from G-d to himself, and part of that is revelation through His creation and His world. His, not ours. To some degree or other we have a choice: to turn towards His world or a human-created world. These two are not compatible, they are not in agreement. G-d is Lord, not us. But we make ourselves to be our own lords.

To the extent we do that, to the extent that we make our own human worlds which humans are the masters of, we cut ourselves off from this living revelation which G-d offers us every single day of our lives.

There are some truths about the Second Commandment which would not have been clear to the ancients, which are becoming clear only now. Now that we are gaining the potential to erase the real world from our minds and substitute it with an unreal human one. In many ways, this has already happened.

Ethical Overdrive

"This is how we know who the children of God are

and who the children of the devil are:

Anyone who does not do what is right is not God's child"

~1 John 3:10

People all over the world have different ideas about different religions or whether there is even any place for any of them. And I don't think it is really possible to diminish those differences much, because this debate about what the very center of existence is about is at the crossroads of extremely powerful and conflicting desires and impulses. It's a battlefield.

Think about it: millions of people out there are trying to define what your entire existence is really about, and that definition may not be one you like. It may be one you hate. I may dislike atheists defining me as chemicals in a pointless universe; atheists might hate theists for saying that if they don't believe in God they are basically frakked; I may hate capitalists defining me as little more than a market and a consumer and a source of dollars to be extracted; Hindus and Buddhists hating on Muslims and vice versa - the more critical the issue, the more it goes to the very pith of our existence, the more vehemently people will fight about it.

It may say something about politics as a quasi-religion that something of that vehemence has infected our politics as well. Lots of people are indifferent to religion but not at all to politics. Perhaps this is the ultimate degeneration of religion, that it becomes mere politics. Even to the irreligious, whatever they think is the point of existence is de-facto their religion. Nobody escapes from religion in this broadest sense, because nobody escapes making decisions about what is important in life and those decisions are based on beliefs.

So this ideological conflict about the point of life and the human person is a battleground of great ferocity. What is also clearly true is that there are good and bad theists and good and bad atheists, good and bad Hindus and good and bad Muslims, and that whether a person is relatively a good or bad person is not well predicted by what they believe. Gandhi is rightly viewed by many as a moral example, but he was an indifferent Hindu. He kind of did his own thing. His murderer was a member of a Hindu nationalist party. Almost everyone can also think of examples of Christian leaders who can say the most absolutely hateful evil things and justify them with cherry-picked quotes from the Bible, even if what they say is clearly (to almost anyone else) contrary to Jesus' own teaching.

What this suggests is that while beliefs about the ultimate meaning of existence are of an almost infinite variety, the spectrum of ethics is not nearly as wide. You can roughly divide people into these three categories:

1.) The committed ethical
(those with very high internal resistance to acting unethically, extremely high personal standards.)

2.) The committed unethical
(people who positively like acting unethically especially if they think they will benefit.)

3.) A big swath of people in between
(people with varying degrees of resistance to acting unethically.)

And while there are limits to reasoning out religion and a wide variety of starting assumptions, few such limits exist as to ethics. One need only accept in common a very few basic principles in order to start reasoning together on a common basis. So that even if you disagree, your disagreement is measured to the same standard because you agree with the same fundamental assertions.

I believe in valuing and respecting all life,
that all living things have inherent value 

Notice that this declaration does not require a specific religious belief, even if it might be best supported by a religious belief. There are probably plenty of atheists who would be willing to agree with this statement, and even if they do not agree with it ideologically, they act as if they DO agree with it when they in fact treat living things with respect. The purely ethical commandments (as versus the religious commandments) of the Ten Commandments can be derived either partially or entirely from this one sentence. A person who acts in a manner contrary to this statement is an evil person.

To me, my faith in G-d is the most important thing in my life, there is no close second. It may not, however, be something I can likely convince anyone else to agree with me about. We do not stand on common ground, we stand on a ground of irreducible division. Debates on ethics, on the other hand, start from things we all have in common or rather beliefs which all people of good will share by the nature of being a person of good will. It is possible for these people of good will to reason together towards a logical conclusion, assuming that all participants are willing to agree that the pursuit of the Good and of right action is a higher priority than personal advantage and selfishness.

This, finding common ground in ethics, may in fact be a point of leverage to finding common ground in religion as well. But whether it is or not, it is surely more profitable to start looking for ways to bring things together rather than always tearing them apart in ideological or political conflict. What is ethical is what is good, and very few people will say point-blank that they believe in being evil. That might not be much of a foundation for a better world, but it is at least some foundation.

But of course, the statement above about the value of all life is fundamentally a religious statement even if it is widely accepted by people of many religions or none. Ethics is still founded on religion, but not necessarily my religion or your religion but a vague fundamental consensus on good and evil and that it is important to be the one and not the other.

Relativism

...my foes taunt me,

saying to me all day long,

“Where is your God?”

~Psalm 42:10

I hear it all the time. "Religion is like blind men describing an elephant," or "how can you say your interpretation of G-d is correct when there are so many" or variations on that theme. It's all relative, ethics are relative, G-d is relative. Or that there is no G-d at all, and that I am just spouting some leftover of an ancient iron-age tribal superstition that has been superseded in our modern, "enlightened" age which is so glorious in its materialistic wisdom.

And to such people I say: no, the truth is not that I do not know or that no one knows. 

The truth is that YOU do not know AND YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

Because if you knew, what you knew would change you. Your sense of your property over your own life and actions would be challenged.

This is the most fundamental faith of our culture: I do what I want.  I own me. No person or god does. Even though everything is owning us all the time. If only we truly understood what we were asking for when we ask to own ourselves, we would beg G-d to own us instead.

And you can no longer do altogether what you want if there is a universal impartial judge of everything you do and want. Make no mistake: ethics and individualism do not mix. To believe in universal objective ethics is to believe that there is something that has some prior right over our own behavior that supersedes our own rights. And if it has some prior right, in the end it has every prior right because every action has ethical implications.

Now I want to make clear that just because I understand G-d's will concerning human behavior does not mean I somehow understand the mind of G-d completely. G-d is sovereign, He decides as He decides and He is beyond human comprehension. The Eternal is not defined by men. If anything, I have a more modest opinion of human knowledge than most. People are very selective in their opinions of the value of human knowledge: that it is good for science and making money and creating human power, but for religious and moral thinking it is somehow worthless. The Eternal is not confined by human concepts, but His will for us is extremely clear and would be unambiguous to everyone except for the corruption and evil of the human heart. Do good. Do not do evil. Resist evil.

But of course we want to own ourselves, we all want to be the boss. G-d would interfere with that.

And so our government kills babies along with terrorists in drone strikes, we treat animals in horrific ways in the name of our agriculture and food, we have abortions, we have crime and drugs, we are tearing up the land and poisoning the air and seas, heating the atmosphere, we oppress our fellow man in the name of capitalism, we spread porn and the objectification of women, we are all objectified by this system, actual Nazis march in our streets, the rich go on consuming and concentrating wealth and the poor are crushed, human arrogance is without limits, and all this goes on and on in the name of the Sovereign Self. The Sovereign Self is murdering ourselves and the world.

And you may ask, "where is your God?"

He sees. He knows. He is watching.

-

It is not human arrogance to submit to G-d's will and urge other human beings to do the same. It is human arrogance NOT to.

-

If people really believed in the value of life, the holiness of life, they could deduce most of  G-d's commands to us by simple reason. But they don't. They believe in the value of themselves only.  They are unholy because they regard life as unholy. Their unholiness is prior to and forms whatever they may think about the matter; what they think and what they will accept is determined first by the fact that they are unholy. Of course they think that G-d is nebulous and ambiguous and uncertain and far away, because if He weren't they couldn't be sovereign selves. Or rather, they still could be, but they would have to become aware of the consequences.

God's Love For Animals

image by 123*chris*

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?

Yet not one of them will fall to the ground

outside your Father's care."

~Matthew 10:29

Many times I support the things I say in this blog on the basis of evidence in the Bible. I am not going to do that much here because the evidence could be taken in so many ways. And honestly I believe the evidence of the Spirit of God upon me is much stronger evidence than any other evidence could be. So I am just going to tell you what I know.

Not what I believe, what I know. And you can choose to believe me or not. For most people, they won't believe me because the hearts of this people are hard. They will not listen to anything good or holy, they are selfish and self-absorbed. What I know is that to kill a living animal for any reason other than true need or self-defense is impure and offensive to God. In other words, if you CAN avoid killing animals, you MUST avoid killing animals. This also means that if you CAN avoid buying meat, you MUST avoid buying meat. If you CAN avoid hunting, you MUST avoid hunting. If you CAN avoid fishing, you MUST avoid fishing. If on the other hand you must buy or hunt or fish meat or otherwise go hungry, then it is permissible. There are people like this even in the modern world, but not many.

It will be difficult for the hard-hearted to understand this, but imagine you are a person who was raised in the country and killed chickens and other animals as a matter of course. Or maybe you went fishing with your dad and cleaned and gutted fish. If this really was you, did you kill your first animal as a child? I want you to think back on what that was like, what you felt. I can tell you what it was like for me, I felt a sense of terrible transgression. I had transgressed, I had sinned, because I had killed without true need. I was going to eat anyway, it's not like I would be going hungry if my fishing had been unsuccessful. If I WERE going hungry otherwise, then it would not be a transgression.

Back in the days of the Exodus when the system of Jewish animal sacrifice was originally instituted, why was it instituted? God wanted people to correct their behavior, to live in the right way, and so there had to be punishments for failing to do so and a means of setting the guilty back on the right track. Really, our own penal institutions ought to take example from it in the sense that it gave not only a method of punishment but a means to re-integrate into society.

Anyway, back to animal sacrifice. Back then the Israelites lived in tents and were constantly on the move, and the only things they really had of value were their flocks. And people were money grubbing and materialistic then just as they are today, except to them their flocks WERE their money. They had no wealth to speak of besides that. So when people transgressed, how do you hit them where it hurts? Take away from their flocks. And so when people sinned, they had to sacrifice from their livestock to atone for it.

Complicating matters further was the fact that most Israelites were obligate pastoralists. They lived in the desert, you can't grow vegetables or grain in the desert. You raise sheep. That means that the only things you can eat are milk and milk products, and meat. That's pretty much it. Theoretically, as some African tribesmen do, you could also drink blood without killing the animal but Jewish law prohibits that. Even if you sell the sheep to buy grain, the sheep is probably going to be eaten anyway, particularly rams. What are you going to do with the male lambs? You can't milk them. I am in no way saying that you can't eat meat if your circumstances do require it. How many people is that true of today? Very few.

However, in their favor, these ancient Jews raised their flocks in a natural way which means that until the slaughter came the animals lived naturally and under better conditions really than they would know in the wild. They lived in the open, but protected by their keepers. Compare that with animal raising today: it is a hell. It is a Dachau for animals, who live and die in boxes and warehouses without a touch of grace or happiness ever entering their lives. They are packed in cages, packed on trucks, treated like they aren't even alive. They are alive and their lives matter.

Humans are special in a way, but in another way they are not special. They are just like any other animal except for their heightened intellects and tool-using capacities and their capacity for spiritual realization. Other than that, they are not different. God cares for animals. But any animal MAY kill if they won't survive any other way. Cats for instance are obligate carnivores, they must kill to live. I don't feed my cat vegetables because that is not what cats eat, they eat meat. And I care about my cat continuing to be alive.

How did Jesus feel about the sacrifices which were constant in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem? Well, first lets look at John the Baptist. Jewish ritual had prescribed water washing for all kinds of things, many Jews practiced ritual immersion, so John the Baptist was not innovative about that. This washing was to remove ritual impurity, not sin. For instance, when a pious Jew touched a dead body, he had to wash himself. He had not actually sinned in touching that dead body or in having the shadow of a leper fall on him or whatever it was, what he was was ritually unclean. In other words, he was not supposed to enter the Temple or the company of other pious Jews until he cleaned himself and removed the "taint of decay" that was upon him. This was because nothing physically impure could stand in the presence of God. The Essenes, who may have been connected to John and Jesus (though the evidence is circumstantial,) washed themselves daily or even more often.

John's baptism was not like that. John's baptism was not for the removal of ritual impurity, it was a symbol of the repentance of moral impurity. This means that John was overtly challenging the animal sacrifice in the Temple, which was also for the repentance of moral impurity. Animal sacrifice was the ONLY means traditionally of atoning for sin. John was saying that the Temple sacrifices were invalid, which the Essenes also believed. This means that John was far more of a rebel than he is commonly conceived of being today. These days people might think, "poor scruffy little dude in the desert wasn't hurting anyone, why did Herod Antipas kill him?" Well, that scruffy little dude in the desert was challenging the entire Temple system and the existence of the Temple itself. He was pointing a loaded gun at all the fat cats in the Temple system and its source of money which was the sale of animals for sacrifice, and he was winning. So for John, the murder of animals in the Temple was not required, not desirable, and possibly not even moral.

So along comes Jesus. On the surface Jesus appears to be the poster boy for nomming on dead fish and getting drunk on wine, because the Gospels depict both activities. However the Gospels must be understood in the light of what happened immediately after Jesus' death, which was an insurrection in Christianity. People who never met Jesus and weren't even Jews were defining what Christianity was. Very often this was directly in contradiction to what Jewish Christians who actually knew Jesus or received teaching from those who knew Jesus believed. This Gentile Christianity exploded like a virus, spreading wildly, while Jewish Christians were killed or scattered by the Roman-Jewish war and the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 ad. The oldest Gospel we have, the Gospel of Mark, was written in Greek by a Gentile Christian. The Jewish Christians were so disrupted that when they finally got around to writing a Gospel, which eventually got absorbed into the Gospel of Matthew, they had to mostly go by Mark which was written by a Gentile. Paul, who never met the living Jesus, wound up writing the future of Christianity, and to all evidence one of Paul's favorite activities was fighting with Jewish Christians. He even at one point takes a left-handed swipe at vegetarianism. Why? Likely because people like James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, were advocating it.

Whenever you read the Gospels, you must understand them through the lens of a Gentile Christianity which was very eager to denounce everything Jewish about what Jesus taught. They were against circumcision, they were against dietary laws, and they were against vegetarianism. Why? Because such restrictions limited their ability to recruit new believers. And you can kind of understand why Paul did this, I am not saying that Paul was an evil man. Here was a whole Gentile world that didn't know anything about the One God. He was not willing that any obstacle should stand in their way on that. And without Paul we probably wouldn't know anything about Jesus at all, so completely was the Jewish Church destroyed. So in this sense we must thank him, but in so doing he grossly distorted real Christianity and so today we only see the real Jesus and the real Christianity as if through a dark lens, in Paul's own words.

When you read the Gospels, read every part of this through the understanding that the Gentiles who wrote them were against circumcision, against dietary laws, against vegetarianism, against alcohol abstinence, against every part of Jewish tradition that would represent an obstacle to Gentile conversion. The Christianity that was handed down to us was in truth Paulianity, not necessarily what Jesus taught.

Getting back to Jesus, how did Jesus show himself to be continuing the actions of John the Baptist? By the "Cleansing of the Temple." Nowadays this event is interpreted as a rebellion against money grubbing and materialism in the temple, with the focus being on the money changers. Why were the money changers there at all though? So people could buy sacrificial animals in the approved currency, shekels. You couldn't buy sacrificial animals with Roman money. So it was actually the whole commerce in animals that Jesus was protesting, as the Gospel of John makes clear:

In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves,

and the money changers seated at their tables.

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple,
both the sheep and the cattle.
He also poured out the coins of the money changers
and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves,
“Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

~John 2:14-16 (emphasis mine.)

He didn't rob the money changers of their money, he just dumped their cash boxes over. The money was still there in the Temple, on the floor. What did he drive out? The animals.  And so Jesus continued John the Baptist's revolt against the Jewish system of animal sacrifice.

In Mark it says he didn't allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple. This is the same man who supposedly told people to carry their mats on the Sabbath, so it wasn't for any Mosaic ritual reasons that he prevented it. What were they carrying? Their lambs, to be killed. You have to understand that the Temple was actually a slaughterhouse on an epic scale, with animals being butchered and sacrificed continually. It was not some sort of serene holy place with quiet monks silently praying. It was an abattoir, with the screams of the slaughtered constantly in the air, the smell of blood and burning fat. The chief priests of the Temple got filthy rich off the system of animal sacrifice, not to mention the monetary requirements to tithe. Who got control of all that money? You guessed it, the chief priests who ran the Temple system.

Why did Jesus rebel against the Temple system aside from the fact that it made a few people rich at the expense of the many? Remember, this was a system established by Moses supposedly at the command of God. What standing did Jesus have to challenge or change it? A good Jew does not go about questioning Moses, but Jesus did and not only on this. Any sensitive soul attuned to the will of God would have been revolted by the scene at the Temple and know that this was no part of what God wanted.

Complete understanding of Jesus' life is impossible at this point, so it is not possible to know whether Jesus was himself a vegetarian. But just as Jesus would have immediately understood that the slaughterhouse of the Temple would have been an abomination, and as he didn't require Moses or anyone else to tell him this but only God's spirit in him alone, in exactly the same way I know that killing animals apart from true need is sinful. The way we treat animals as an industrial product is shameful and disgusting, and there will be a reckoning. I don't need to quote the Bible on that, I have God's spirit on me. I know it's wrong, as much as I know I am drawing breath and typing on a computer keyboard. How about you justify to ME how such a horror should be allowed to exist?

You cannot. It's inexcusable. I don't have to quote the Bible on it, I tell you directly: it is evil.

Poem?

image by Giorgio Galeotti

I genuinely do not know what this is. It came to me, I give it to you.

I think there is a parallel between the idea of the impossibility of understanding God in human terms, and the idea of transformation and rebirth in the New Testament. The transformation I mean is, that once there was this man who was an entirely natural man and pursued all the things that men and other animals want. Food, sex, intoxication, distraction. And then this natural man becomes an unnatural man, a spiritual man. For Paul this is a man transformed into the image of Christ, who have become in some sense Christ or that they (natural man) died and Christ lives in them instead.

So the Word for the transformed man is not a word that the other man understands, because they are not the same kind of being anymore. Christians have all this in their bibles but they don't typically take it quite as seriously as perhaps they ought: that the new man is not really a man anymore. He has become something else.

There is something else here as well. The statement in Matthew 16 that the kingdom will come while some standing there are still alive has always been a troublesome one, since according to conventional understanding we are all still here 2000 years later and the Kingdom has not arrived. The Kingdom arriving means the death of the world we know. I give the example of a chicken running with its head cut off, dead but still acting alive. Something that impressed me in my vision, meditation, call it whatever, is this idea that our entire world, the world we know as human beings, having been so long ago ashes that the ashes have turned to stone and the stone has turned to mountains.

Make of it all what you will.

NOT-MAN

There is a new word

This is a word no man has heard

we have not heard it

we are not of it

there is a new word

no man has heard it

if you wish to hear it

you must become a not-man

It is all already over

It is all ashes

and the ashes have become soil

and the soil has become rock

and the rock has become mountain

Kingdom come already came

This is the vision I had

That I was sitting alone in a tower

Amidst a great emptiness

dotted by spires of rock

and the rock was the ashes

of the world we know

having compressed for millions of years 

having uplifted

having eroded

And we men are in a sort of half-life

ticking down like a radioactive element

waiting to turn to lead

but everything is already lead. 

The world HAS ended

we are just too dumb to know it

like a headless chicken running

The world is end, IS death, is past.

Hear a new word

One no man can hear

You must become something else to hear it

You must metamorphosis from the ashes

life from death

from man to something else

What does the not-man do?

The not-man cries out

cries out in a great emptiness

but his cry has no emotion

It is only energy filling the emptiness with its waves. 

It cries out because it is energy

and because the emptiness longs to be filled

Polarity responding to polarity

Who can wait until it is all emptiness and stillness?

Who can cry out from his not-man self 

when the emptiness and stillness appears?

This is the word no man has heard. 

 

Forgiveness

Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him,

“See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse
may happen to you.”

-John 5:14

Christians today place entirely too great an emphasis on forgiveness. In a great number of Jesus' healings, he followed up by saying, "stop sinning." Of course back then physical handicaps were regarded as the consequence of sin, whereas if that were actually the case hardly any of us would be standing. Regardless, In Jesus' case the forgiveness of the sin (the actual healing) was very often followed up by an admonition to stop sinning. Someone's request for forgiveness carries very little weight if they keep doing the thing they need forgiveness for. If someone were to slap you and then ask your forgiveness, you would kind of expect them to stop slapping you, wouldn't you?

Does forgiveness matter? Sure it does. But God always responds to a sincere request for forgiveness. What determines whether it is sincere? Whether your behavior changes, or at least whether you put forward an earnest effort to change it. So what really matters here is changing yourself, isn't it? It's not like God is hoarding up forgiveness and only spends it like a miser spends coins. He is more than ready: the question is, are you?

Back in the day, if an Israelite sinned he would have to sacrifice an animal to atone for it. Not sure what the animal thought of this substitution, but I doubt he was keen on it. This was a simple and crude mechanism for a simple and crude and materialistic people (which means most people, now as then.) To most ancient Hebrews, the flocks were everything: they were wealth and status and food and clothing and shelter. So if you have to pay out a bull every time you oogle your neighbor's wife or con the old widow out of her retirement money, that is a significant disincentive to ever doing it again. But even there, the target of the action is not primarily forgiveness, it is getting you to change your ways.

Christians today though get to cash in on the forgiveness without actually having to repent of the sin! I am reminded of a late friend of mine who was genuinely a devout Baptist but also pretty much committed every sin in the book. He would argue that Jesus covered his debt completely, so while his behavior was not pleasing to God he wouldn't go to hell for it, whereas a good person who did not believe in Jesus' atoning sacrifice absolutely would. This same individual met his end being bludgeoned to death in a crack house, supposedly after making unwelcome sexual advances on a drug dealer.

Truly this is a deep perversion of Jesus' teaching, and clearly contrary to the New Testament, even though the New Testament was primarily composed by gentile Pauline Christians. The apostle Paul was the man who invented the idea of "grace not works," the doctrine from which Christianity suffers today. The Gospel of John spells out the need for repentance to be met with actions in the beautiful Vineyard passage:

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you,

you will bear much fruit (deeds, behavior;) apart from me you can do nothing.

If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers;

such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

-John 15:5

Or this passage in Matthew 7:

By their fruit (deeds, actions) you will recognize them.

Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?

Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

-Matthew 7:16-17

Fruit in the New Testament always means deeds, actions, behavior. The idea that you are somehow no longer responsible for your misdeeds because of the blood of Jesus is an absolute abomination and contrary to Jesus' own teaching. Supposedly we need Jesus' death to purge us of original sin and the sins we inevitably accumulate in life. Well, God was forgiving people their sins from the get-go! Was Jesus already crucified when David said this?

Blessed is the one

whose transgressions are forgiven,

whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the one

whose sin the Lord does not count against them

and in whose spirit is no deceit.

-Psalm 32:1-2

David had been dead a thousand years before Jesus was even born! How did he get his sins forgiven with no crucifixion? Same way as always, God forgave him directly. Clearly, obviously, God had been forgiving sins from the beginning. Nor has there ever been any reluctance on God's part to forgive sins: 

the reluctance is on Man's part to repent of committing them! 

God isn't the roadblock to forgiveness, people themselves are. What the Christians have done to the teachings of Jesus are an abomination to God and would have been an abomination to Jesus as well.

If you sincerely want forgiveness, you will repent of doing wrong. If your repentance is sincere, you'll act to stop doing it in future. If you do all of that, you don't have to worry about your forgiveness, it is granted before you asked. There is no reluctance on God's part. The reluctance is on our part to do what is right.

By their fruits you will know them.

Seek

Image by Maxdrobot

"Ask and it will be given to you;

seek and you will find;

knock and the door will be opened to you."

-Matthew 7:7

What could possibly be of more worth than seeking God? Seeking where you came from, where you are going, and why and what you are doing on the way? How could anything be more important than that? Those who seek will find.

What is it though that you are actually seeking? The thing you actually seek you will find, so if you seek God but really seek yourself, that is what you will find. If you seek God but really seek a church, you will find a church. If you seek God but really seek a religion, you will find a religion. If you seek God but really seek your own ego, that is what you will find. If you seek God but really seek to control others, you won't get God but something else. We must shake off all worldliness to seek God purely, otherwise we are not really seeking Him.

Be not misled. The love of God must be an all consuming fire, or it is not at all. It cannot come second place to anything else. You must be willing to sacrifice all else but that. Before that, the desire for wealth, for security, for the good opinion of others, for pleasure, indeed the world itself and your own life must be seen as mere kindling for this fire. You see the goodness and holiness of God and want only that. You are single-minded, single-sighted, single-hearted.

At a certain point, you are seeking God so sincerely that you become aware that He seeks you back. He grabs you with talons of steel and won't let you go. If you stumble, you will be so horrified that you will do anything rather than sin again, and so you will be lifted ever upwards. God wants to lift us from our condition, He just requires that we desire it enough. He needs for us to understand that only this matters.

ONLY this matters. Let that sink in for a minute.

Who am I? In this world, I am nobody. What do I own? In this world, I own nothing. What is my position, what is my status, what is my title, my occupation, what flag do I fly, what are my politics? I don't have any. Who is my master? God. What is my home? The Kingdom of Heaven. What am I? God's child.

Self-Evident

I do not believe that what I am about to say requires any particular religious belief.

I hold these truths to be pretty well

self-evident:

1. That the world is a place of evil and suffering and enslavement.

2. That this evil and suffering is intentional. In other words

it was planned and implemented by some intelligence, however

difficult such an intelligence may be to imagine.

Now, you can call these statements religion or you can call them plain reason or whatever you like, but I believe both these truths are fully accessible to any sufficiently aware mind. And once you fully accept the first truth, you will more readily understand the second: that it isn't accidental. That it is too complete to occur by happenstance. To me, any religious truth is subject to re-evaluation except these two, and I believe they are fully understandable by people who aren't religious.

Now, the big stumbling block for most people is the first proposition, because given the selfish nature of human beings, people believe that if things are tolerable for them or they are finding life enjoyable, then life is pretty okay generally speaking. The vast inconceivable ocean of human suffering and enslavement and degradation is not on their radar screens, so for them it does not exist until they get cancer or some other horrible disease and understand that this torture is what life is for numberless millions of people. For first-worlders, their relative wealth insulates them from such things as seeing people dying on the sidewalks from curable diseases and old men and women breathing out their last in a wet ditch covered in their own waste, as is a not uncommon sight in some corners of the world. It insulates them from the special horror of child labor, little children pressed into service in the name of industry and commerce. It insulates them from the prisoner living out his time in a special man-made hell on Earth.

However, even aside from all this, cruelty and pain is an integral part of the operating system of life on Earth. Even plants thrive on death though they don't always cause it (sometimes they do) and all animal life depends on the destruction of other organisms. Animals do feel pain and humans cause imprisonment and torment to billions of sensate beings in the name of food or industry.

In my mind's eye I can see you turning a blind eye to these truths, turning away from them, rationalizing them. I can hear you thinking "there is pleasure in life, there is joy in life, it is not as dark as you say." And thus pleasure performs its prime function in this world for human beings: keeping you participating in the process. The perfect hell is not all torment, there is enough reward to keep you chasing after it and keeping the wheels of this world moving. This world would not serve its purpose if all beings simply said "fuck it" and stopped eating and died. No, you have to be involved, you have to love it, which is part of the intentionality I mentioned. The perfect prison has no walls, except in the prisoner's mind. The pleasure in life is part of the trap. And most forms of pleasure involve perpetuating the suffering of other beings.

Enjoy a fine meal? I bet whatever you are eating didn't like the process of getting it to you.

Sex? Pair-bonding is necessary to keep the species going and emotional love and the drama of romance is useful as a distraction from what the world really is.

Like to go for a car trip? Enjoy a nice roller coaster ride? Want to visit foreign lands? The energy needed to power these things is usually ripped from the Earth, with the attendant habitat disruption and suffering of living creatures.

Virtually every sort of pleasure involves suffering for something else. Even if you enjoyed relatively ethically "clean" pleasures that don't directly involve the suffering of some creature, these pleasures serve to distract you from what is really going on. They serve the master of this world, whatever inconceivable existant that might be. Satan, call him what you want, doesn't matter.

The previous comments should make clear that I believe the possibility of a good and benevolent God creating the world as it now is, is unthinkable. Whether it was created by an intelligent malevolent being (lets call him Satan) or co-opted by such a being, is not in my province. It is not mine to know. I am restricting myself to those truths which are most clear, most irrefutable to me and can be readily understood by anyone who actually wants to see the truth. What is clear to me is that a God of peace, of truth and of goodness would hate such a world and desire to see it ended and the poor creatures in it freed. This would also mean that the action of God if He exists is either limited or self-limited, that He would do away with this torment but for some unknown reason cannot. Or that his mode of action is humanly inconceivable.

Now, assuming that you agree with the first proposition, what about the second? What makes me think that such a carefully crafted system of torment and enslavement is intended to exist? Well, first our existence as sensate beings. A naturally formed accidental world would have no use for interior experience or the experience of pain as we know it. This is a fundamental aspect of our existence, that we have an interior world that is markedly different from the nature of the exterior world, that we can feel. You can't have torture without someone to be tortured, a creature for whom torture is real. You can't torture a machine, nor would there be any point in trying. It is our humanity, our consciousness, which is indispensable to torture. It is in fact that which is most "godlike" in us that makes us susceptible to torment. Evolution doesn't need that, but a torturer does.

Secondly, the system of torment and enslavement is comprehensive. It is a complete system from which few if any can ever escape. It is self-perpetuating via pleasure and instinct. Think about it, what instincts do virtually all animals have? Breathe, drink, eat, excrete, reproduce, fight or flight. While we are the subjects of this captivity we are also the engine to keep the captivity operating as intended. Kill, consume, breed, repeat. It is brilliant and insidious. Whatever name you wish to call the master of this world, he's a genius. And there is enough pleasure to be found in the system to keep the slaves walking the treadmill as intended. Like I said, the perfect prison has no walls.

The world is a system designed to keep what might be called "sparks of God" (our sensate and conscious selves) imprisoned, tortured, and deluded as to their actual condition. It doesn't want them to escape from the reach of its torment. Logically, this would mean that this evil master doesn't want death to be the end of their captivity and torment, so you couldn't simply die to escape it. So he would grab that spark and shove it back into a body and repeat the torture all over again. Satan torturing the offspring of God, forever. It's a bleak picture, but I believe it is a truthful one. You, dear reader, may find this exceedingly difficult to accept. You were intended not to accept it. He or It doesn't want you to. One person out of perhaps hundreds will accept it. I believe however that every person who does accept it becomes a thorn in Satan's side. He torments the torturer. Every free man or woman is a torment to him.

Now, if you accept that the aforementioned is the case, that the world is a place of suffering and enslavement and is meant to be, what can we do about it? Can we free ourselves with religion? You must surely know if you have gotten this far and understood it, that the evil one would never allow a true religion to exist on this Earth, not one with any sizable number of adherents. ALL religions with any sizable number of practitioners has been corrupted to do his bidding, to keep you here. You must surely know this, if you have agreed with what I said so far. With great difficulty can the true signal be read from all the noise, but it exists. Snippets have gotten past the censors because the evil one understands that people will say they believe in a religion and not even think closely about its texts. Like all the people who say they are Christians but clearly don't understand the simplest thing about what Jesus actually said. They are living a religion of human invention.

The only thing I know to do right now is to renounce the world and everything in it (except the sensate beings themselves.) In both word and deed to hate the world and its master with every single fiber of my being. To become a fire that burns the World, a fire of purity and goodness like my Father is, so that Satan will spit me out. To become enlightened, unconquerable by him. To resist the flesh at every turn.

That's a tall order, and I am not there yet. I do believe I am entering a phase in my life where that becomes not only possible but compulsory. Whoever joins me in this quest would be closer to me than the pupil of my eye, and we are one.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. 

If anyone loves the world, love for the Father

is not in them.

~1 John 2:15

Fire

Image by Malene Thyssen

"This third I will put into the fire;

I will refine them like silver

and test them like gold.

They will call on my name

and I will answer them;

I will say, ‘They are my people,’

and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’ ”

~Zechariah 13:9

The world is a fire. It is however very hard to be objective about a fire when you are burning in it. I am not at all sure I am objective about it myself.

I have tended to agree with the Gnostic idea that the world is inherently evil and dominated by evil. The Gospel of John appears to agree with that appraisal. But this leads inevitably to the question, and it is a question the Gnostics clearly had issues with, of how then it is allowed to be such. For the Gnostics... the world is a mistake. The creation of the world was an error, a malfunction, one having nothing to do with us. For more mainstream Christians it is also a mistake of sorts, but in this case entirely our own. Or rather, our ancestors, and ourselves are allowed to carry the burden of our ancestors mistake down to this day. For some, it is an inevitable consequence of our free will.

I am going out on a limb and say that they are all full of horseshit. As unsatisfying and tacked-on as the Adam and Eve story is as an explanation of evil, the Gnostics are even worse, coming up with the most convoluted explanation of how divine but not supreme or even knowledgeable beings wound up creating the world in a rather bastardized way. To me, what that suggests is that neither the ancient Jews nor the Christians nor the Gnostics - none of them had a clue, and they had to come up with something. Because they didn't know.

To have God create the world when the world is evil is rather problematic. Of course Christians don't agree that the world is evil, despite John telling them pretty point-blank that it is. Not only John either, you can find snippets suggesting the same in other Gospels. I would go so far as to say that the Christians' lack of appropriate revulsion for the satanic nature of worldly power and authority was the cause of many of their excesses and evils in the centuries afterwards. How you could go from "do not love the World" and "the prince of this world (Satan) now stands condemned" to having a ROMAN EMPEROR preside over the consolidation of church dogma is a game of mental Twister that I have a hard time understanding.

Anyway, back on topic, did God create the world? Because if He was in fact the author of a place of evil and suffering, that would challenge the idea of the goodness of God. If like the Gnostics think he didn't create it but doesn't UNcreate it, it matters little. You would either have a God that creates an evil world or a God who doesn't give a whit about it existing. Any way you look at it, unless you have a God who is powerless or a God who is okay with evil, it presents the same problem.

Believers in God, Jew Christian and Muslim alike, have tended to take a pretty hard attitude towards those perceived to be evil. Stone em, burn em, behead em. They have condemned them to their hells, to burn everlastingly. They have not been very tolerant towards them. I approve of their hatred of evil, if that is actually what it is, but say that it is improperly directed. The place where the hatred of evil is appropriately applied is within yourself, not without. Within the believer himself. Not to other people.

I am going to say something that might be kind of hard to wrap your head around. You might accuse me of spinning horseshit about God's theoretical responsibility for the world like the Jews, Christians and Gnostics have done before me. And maybe you are right, I wouldn't be the best judge of that.

The world is evil, yes. Its fundamental processes are evil, human power structures are evil, it's evil.

God willed or allows it to exist, yes. Both those things are true. The omnipotence of God means that the world could not exist if God did not will it to do so.

And though the world is genuinely evil and dominated by evil, and that evil is extremely real to those suffering the consequences of it, that evil in the end will not exist except abstractly and will not have really existed. None who were ever truly alive will be dead or impaired in any way. There will be no adverse consequences of having lived in the world except for how long you have to spend there.

Imagine a future schoolroom. In this future there is no war or injustice, but parents want their children to understand war and injustice. So there are very high-tech equivalents of VR headsets through which these children can experience what it was like to be in the trenches during WWI or in the Holocaust in WWII. And they experience everything exactly as it was, perfectly. But at the end of class, they take off their VR equipment and go home to their loving parents, and aside from a remembrance of what happened (and perhaps a few late-night nightmares) there are no lasting consequences. They felt the bullet enter their heart, but they are whole. They breathed the cyanide and mustard gas, but they still breathe. They murdered their fellow man, but they did not truly sin, because none of it ultimately exists. They did this to understand how precious their current liberty and peace was. This evil of war and death and hate, it still existed abstractly, their society could decline again to such a state, but it will not.

We are in this fire of evil because God wills it, and because God wills it for our good. Yes, many, most in fact, won't get that this go-round, but there are other days in school and other journeys in the VR headsets and other opportunities to learn what we should all know, how terrible evil is, and how good God is. There are no sinners burning in hell, there are only ignorant ones who don't understand and so must stay here in this simulation until they learn. Do not remain in Plato's cave imagining that shadows are reality, come outside with me to the Light.

Evil is terrible. Our proper action expressing our utter revulsion at it should be directed on ourselves, not other people. We don't have the right to judge anyone, this was one of the insightful snippets Jesus told us about. There is more than enough work to do on ourselves. I for one don't want to stay here in school, I want to leave and enter the greater world of God. This being the case, I would hope that I always examine myself for sin, not others.

How great will be our praise to God when we finally understand all that we have been going through and how great has been His care of us! Even in this fire, even here, I say that only God reigns.

No Messiah

Ruins of King David's palace, image by Deror_avi

And the Lord told him (Samuel):

“Listen to all that the people are saying to you;

it is not you they have rejected,

but they have rejected me (God) as their king.

As they have done from the day

I brought them up out of Egypt until this day,

forsaking me and serving other gods,

so they are doing to you. 

~1 Samuel 8:7-8

I am going to say something that is not going to sit well with either Christians or Jews: there is no Messiah. The idea of a Messiah, a godly king, is and always was a terrible mistake.

What is the message that God tells men repeatedly from the Exodus onwards? That men are darkened, wicked, that even the best of them are corruptible. Even the best of them sin. And of course, most are not the best, most of the Israelites were rejecting God repeatedly from the first footstep of the Exodus to the very last book of the Old Testament.

The idea of a messiah began with King David, a man who murdered a man to screw the man's wife, likely in addition to other misdeeds not chronicled. However, the reason Israelites had kings at all began in the days of Samuel. The Israelites wanted to have a king like all the neighboring lands had kings: prior to this they had judges who would wander around deciding matters. Some of the judges were good like Samuel and some were bad, like Samuel's sons. The fact that they even needed judges was a testament to their disunity and rebellion from God's law. So the Israelites came up to Samuel and said basically that Samuel was old and his sons were bad and every other people around them had kings, so they wanted a king too. Samuel took this complaint to God, and as the quote above says, God told them that the people of Israel had rejected Him (God) as their king. In other words, God was their only rightful king, and a human king would be an usurpation of God's proper place in their lives. Which means that David was not the rightful king either.

Just a quick aside - the phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" has tended to take on a vaguely esoteric air in the centuries that have elapsed since Jesus' time. What it really means is exactly what it says: rule of the world and human beings directly by God. Now, what role would a human king play in such rulership? None at all: in this current epoch no human being could possibly be qualified to rule in place of God (it would be nearly blasphemous to say they could,) and in "the world to come" as religious Jews say, there would be no need of such a human king. Isaiah says, "The knowledge of God would fill the land like water fills the sea." In other words, everyone blessed to live in such a world would know what God wants immediately - no human ruler needed.

This has been what it has all been about from the beginning - the rulership of God. Not men, not "god-men" if such an abomination were ever allowed, just God.

Getting back to David - the Israelites loved David. He brought them victory in battle and did not seem as arrogant as most kings. He listened to the prophets. He was still a really bad guy in absolute terms - murder being a very grievous sin in most people's understanding of the word - but he was not AS bad as most kings of the time and he did bring them victory and glory and a capital city. So of course, being weak humans, they viewed their religion to some degree through that lens. There are Jews today waiting for their new David. Christians think they have already gotten theirs, but he has left the physical scene for a time until the end of days. In truth, there is no messiah: the whole thing was an invention of people who were addicted to worldly glory and national pride.

The quote from Samuel should tell us everything we need to know. We should feel it in our bones, too: I have no king but God. Not a distorted Christ, not a past or future Jewish David, no king but adonai elohim, the Lord our God. The only one possibly qualified to run the world. The only source of sufficient wisdom. The only incorruptible. The only sinless. Why in the world should we look to some human ruler instead of the very One whose knowledge is like the sand on an endless beach, like the stars in the universe? The very idea of a messiah is a confession of ignorance.

Of course, people like messiahs. Messiahs are glamorous. They flatter human vanity and cater to human emotions. But there is no messiah.

No King But God Alone.