The Godless and Soteriology

I listened to Rev. Flowers Soteriology 101 pod cast yesterday.  My commute time in Vancouver was doubled by the fog. Everywhere medical marijuana drivers had slowed their vehicles down so they could collectively stare and say, “Wow, Man!” It really was surreal and beautiful.
Vancouver is a bipolar city with moods fluctuating with the weather and commutes fluctuating due to poor administration of the road services from anywhere between a 1/2 hour and 2 hours daily.  The real money in the city comes from crime and government.  The criminals and the elite live in the city. The commuters like me are just the modern peasants.
Soteriology is the study of “Salvation”.  An end days prescription.  Like George Carlin, “What is this hand basket and where are we going anyway.”  Every day a person not on drugs or willing to forego the Starbucks coffee waiting in the city, gets up and drives their car either north or east, heading to the country or the prairies just to get away from the boredom of Vancouver in the darkness of ‘daylight saving’ and the rain of winter.
Snow and sunshine seem preferable to whiplash seeking pirates looking for ICBC insurance windfalls offered daily by the legal lottery that runs the province.  Meanwhile ,why work when the government taxes the workers while giving a pass to the criminals and speculators.  It’s the same with guns. Criminals have them. But the government taxes those who own them and pay taxes on them.  So the government simply does the same with workers, demonizing them, and punishing them with greater and greater taxes while leaving the criminals to prosper.
Salvation sounds like a lovely contrast to the media circus and the daily toil of hedonist smog producing bike laned city life especially as the government is taxing the air we breathe and water is now bought and sold.  Death has an appeal.  Euthanasia is marketed medically along with marijuana.
It pays to check out the tourist brochures of the various religions ultimate destination offers.
I once wrote a paper on Heaven and concluded that Christianity and Taoism had the best resorts in the after life. I didn’t really care to fight each day in pagan Valhalla.  Hanging with virgins didn’t seem nearly so appealing since the virgins I knew weren’t a particularly a attractive lot.
As a doctor I also know that the hymen restorative surgical industry is a thriving business.  The introduction of the birth control pill removed the whole need for virginity that leftover from  the agricultural and herding days of breeding, eugenics and  and thoroughbred children.  Today 50 % of the children of divorce are by DNA study, not those of the father.  Despite this, the  Jews continue to step on glasses at wedding.  Muslims kill people who look at their promiscuous sisters.  Myla Cyress, the penultimate Hollywood disease attacting slut, rides her ‘wrecking ball’.  New religions like feminism are sources of perpetual anger and ‘offence’ , like nation states in the empires building colonial days. New colonialists.  Different names, same old, same old , game.
Soteriology says each religion and each culture had some purpose and meaning.  Today the Godless simply lie and deny that they really want the most toys at the end but their agenda always is world dominance for purely hedonistic reasons. They don’t have an afterlife so can’t really care for their own children.  All must cease to exist when they, Gods of their own making,  no longer exist. No wonder there is an opioid epidemic.
The Buddhists by contrast are the most truthful.  Soteriology or salvation for them is ‘nirvana’ , ‘liberation from suffering’.  Life is ‘samsara” or the never ending cycle of misery.  All Buddhist humor is a kind of Vietnam black humor which makes their laughter so infectious.  Even Kierkegaard the great Christian theologian said ‘life is suffering unto death’.  Quite a contrast to the promises of politicians, whores, bankers, marketting agencies, and Hollywood.  Nothingness is the reward of life.
The Christian ‘salvation’ is saving the soul from ‘sin’.  Sin is a word used to describe the ‘missing of a mark’.  Christianity like Zen uses an analogy of the archer. The archer shoots an arrow and if ‘Good intentions didn’t pave the road to hell’ the arrow would always hit the mark. Christianity like Science asks the question of ‘outcome measure’.  The ‘deviance’ from the aim is called ‘sin’. In science we’d explain the ‘error’ as ‘windage’ , ‘arrow’ material’ , ad infinitude.  Christians say that sin follows from separation from God. Salvation is made possible in Christianity by the life and death and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, (God entered his creation, lived it, found it in error ,  corrected it, died and resurrected..  The cross of Christianity is the ‘cross road”. It’s all about choice and freedom of choice. Also I imagine God was just a tad cross as his creation when it killed his creatures killed him suggesting either a design error, a Robert Graves sacrifice of the king or downright naughtiness of children unattended. Apparently the computer reset didn’t take a Noah flood but the cosmic fix could be put in with ‘love’.
There is also however a pesky issue of ‘predestination’ and ‘grace’ .Soteriology addresses these ultimately Unchristian factors in Christianity.
A good Christian gets ‘mansions in heaven’ and time with God.  Virgins are apparently optional and singing replaces war. It sounds much more appealing as you get older.  You also get a new body while the Muslims must make due with the resurrection of the one they died in. This explains the mass exodus of male followers of Islam to Christianity after they have suffered castration by whatever means.
Only 1 in 1000 Muslims actually get to any kind of heaven so it’s a lottery system anyway with most ending up in fire and despair just like some Christian sects who feel the stick is far better than the carrot for managing the followers. Corruptions naturally goes along with either lottery system.
The Judaism Soteriological construct is as a collective not like Christianity which is individual. Jews are never individual tourists but must travel by the bus loads. The attraction of aetheism for the likes of Marx and other Godless Jews is that many Jews simply don’t believe in an afterlife “The dead know nothing. They have no reward.”  However other Jews do believe in an afterlife, though not nearly as attractive in terms of housing as the Jewish Christian sects believed.
In Hinduism Samedhi or Moksha is the escape from ‘samsara’ the cycle of death and rebirth.  This may mean like the Buddhists a loss of individuality but it might also mean a simple closing of this book before the opening of the other. This goes with the idea of this ‘caterpillar’ existence where enlightenment is a ‘butterfly’ existence. How can a caterpillar know as a butterfly. “I am the bubble make me the sea’.  There’s closure and possibility without the idea of a human ‘body’ or the anthropomorphism associated with the mystery religions.  The Sikh seed the ‘union with God’ as a drop of water joining the sea.
There’s a sense with the Godly that we’re all going in the same direction in a sense. Pesky pagans preparing to fight forever are as challenging to be around as those who truly believe that this is it and there are no consequences, except perhaps indigestion, for eating one’s neighbour.
Rev. Francis was challenging the Calvinist notion of preditermination, the idea that God’s chosen are already picked and the out come is ‘fixed’.  This has an anthropormorphic quality considering however we find that elections, soccer games and leadership positions are ‘rigged’.  Why not think that God has ‘rigged’ this life. The least taught book of the Bible, Job, certainly challenges the notion of Satan and dualism. Satan might well have been God’s companion creation or alter ego before the creation of more entertaining humans with delusions of free will.
Personally I’ve considered myself a ‘voice over’ on a ‘comic strip’ .  The question then is who is the writer. I’m writing my life or God or worse ‘the Borg Government of Canada’. And if the ending is ‘fixed’, as my dope smoking friend believes, “why worry, be happy.”
There’s a notion of ‘happy cabbages’ and I find when I ask people ‘why’ or ‘where are you going’ or ‘what do you want in the big picture’ they commonly simply shit themselves.  I know that beurocrats are the most disturbed by that question. They hide behind platitudes and swagger with confidence but the seed of doubt and the depth of fear is so readily apparent in their eyes.
Most who join armies have said simply, I don’t know I don’t care I just want to be a tool.  I’m here to pay for my family because that hedonistically feels good. Others believe the signs offering travel and education.
I am no more than an animal, they say. I mimic the words and motions of man but really no more. Everyone agrees with me. I represent everyone. I’m schizophrenic and leave me alone. Don’t ask me such questions!!!!
Soteriology. Thank you Rev. Flowers.