Jesus Baptism: Christian Theology , Materialism and Faith

Evolution says we developed from the ape.  We are as humans very similar to chimpanzees.  One of the important differences from animals that man appears at times is the ability to ‘self reflect’ or ‘internalize’.  Tool making was once a distinguishing feature but we now know that not only do monkeys make and use tools, birds, which evolved directly from dinosaurs and even fish and insects use tools.  We don’t know if they have imaginations or they think so called intellectual questions. Indeed in the matter of quantum physics, string theory and different dimensions cats may as we have presumed be only present in this dimension utilizing the teeniest fraction of their intelligence.

The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy posited that mice were running the earth as an experiment.  The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas suggests that our present state of awareness is a reflection of our general anxiety and depression.  The enlightened mind is capable by contrast of God like insight and capacity. Certainly neurologists have long noted we don’t appear to use much of our tremedous brain power, something most brilliant students have heard from their teachers or parents.  

Aetheism whose principle social expression to date is communist socialism  a pure fantasy that the world is solely materialistic and man’s principle goal is power.  The world according to aetheists is divided into the oppressor and the oppressed. Later cultural Marxism following on the Frankfurt school and the fall of the International Marxist Socialism  of the USSR and the National Socialism of Nazism.  China continues with it’s totalitarianism for now with  the consequent increasing murder of those who are different. Communism has recently killed millions.   One considers this devolution of aetheism into the tribalism and law of the jungle of so called primitive man to date perhaps to be the most primitive and reductionist analysis of humans to date.

Even the superstitious primitives and tribal humans posited an unseen world. Local Aboriginals fore fathers claimed there was a Creator and that humans had a relationship with the creator and all of creation.  Creation gods abound in history.  

Aetheists claim at best a Big Bang.  Dr. Mario de Beuregaard, neuroscientist author of Spiritual Brain gives the best description of the PSEUDOSCIENCE that dominates the politics of today.  

The question of the Big Bang is tied to Marcus Aurelius and St. Augustine. We simply don’t know that yesterday exists any more than we know tomorrow exists. We even must ask others about our supposed birth and must rely on ‘memory’ to conclude the history of our own existence.  An elegant analysis of time and intelligence simply showed it was impossible for a monkey to learn to play piano like Bach in the time given from the proposed Big Bang To now.  Owen Barfied described the fundamental function of the brain was to ‘save the appearances’.  We fill in the gaps and we make up things.  We are a fanciful creature. 

Indeed the argument has been made that the big brain of the human is an evolutionary development that was for deceit. That a wholly honest animal would signal to a lion it wanted to eat it and get eaten.  The Book of Tells, How to Read People’s Minds by their Actions is a classic text for gamblers by Peter Collett.  It shows that man has attempt to succeed with the development of a ‘poker face’ and various other deceits which are apparent as incongruences between what is said and what is shown.  Actions apparently speak louder than words. Trojan Horse is one of the children’s classic tales of enlightenment. Today we have journalists, fake news and Wikipedia. 

Christians believe in Jesus Christ.  He is an unseen god, also the son of an unseen god, who promised to send his believers an unseen god to serve them.  The Trinity, is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Gospel which translates as the Good News says that Jesus was born as a human child and did miracles. He was baptized by John, preached in the temples of the day, taught and interpreted the scriptures of the day for ordinary men and women, then  healed people with sickness by asking his father for healing.  He said he served his father and he was an advocate for man. His father was in heaven.

Heaven is not of this earth. It may be inside.  The detractors of faith always put heaven in the sky when it’s clear that Christians have described heaven as connected to the nous or spiritual heart centred in the chest.  

The powerful men of the day faked being spiritual for profit. The soldiers and police of the day lorded over the physical world taxing and stealing the work and profits of others. They saw Jesus as a threat.  His own people’s leaders betrayed him to the conquering army’s leadership and he was crucified.  

The Good News is he resurrected from the grave and rose to heaven. This rising was described in a sense into a different dimension however it’s hard to describe with certainty for the knowledge of the galaxy as we know it today was unknown to the followers of Jesus perhaps.  Whose to say he wasn’t beamed up by God. Alien intelligence just begs the question.  There is little doubt  that he taught his followers, walked their world and that they too gained the ability to heal and enlighten. If we believe in a linear yesterday as opposed to a stellate now.  We awake each day and sleep only to awak with a new set of memories and priorities.  Fragmented hard drives etc.   Even the notion of infinity in in doubt to an agricultural people who viewed time only so far as a ‘long time’.  Greek philosophers, all of which were religious and spiritual, not at all aetheistic, like some philosophers today, have to a large extent conceptualized and described modern ideas thousands of years ago.  That Jesus resurrected was not a  ‘idea’ before him.  Reincarnation was an old idea. It was not only a Jewish idea which is evoked in the book Evolution of God by Princeton University’s Robert Wright. He addresses some of the early ‘rewritings of the bible’.  The earliest text of the Jewish Torah is definitely abridged by a later priestly writer much like the editing of Christian writings by the Council of Nicaea. Ideally there would be a prime text with a ‘commentary’ but some ideas are expunged especially by the STATE which is never truly in favour of FREEDOM of SPEECH as seen today with the latest hydra of Censorship under the guise of protecting people from Hate Speech despite history’s lesson that the Government is the most hateful creation of all time.   Christianity’s fundamental message is that Government Kills God.  Beware of Government.  In the  case of Jesus there were ‘witnesses’to his resurrection. .  The most important of the  skeptics was ‘doubting Thomas’.

Jesus taught Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself. This is not something we’ve seen our state leaders and politicians doing now nor apparently in 2000 years since Jesus was killed by the Government of his day for this Revolutionary Idea.  Christians remain the most persecuted people in the world.  .  

Neitze by contrast posited a Superman God and argued that Christianity was a poor man’s God. Jesus was seen as the ‘servant god’ , a vulnerable human baby who was eventually killed on a tree.  The early God’s of empire had been God Kings.  The Magna Carta of England had placed restrictions on the political figures of the day.  Even today the political figures insist they are intrinsically superior.  Locally the ‘hereditary chiefs’ of the aboriginals lord it over others of the band in the classic tribal hierarchy that had the ancient ‘nobility’ of Medievalism arguing that greatness was in the blood and breeding.  

God king leaders are still common in the world today though not as overtly as such in the west as they remain in the east.  Pride goest before the fall the Greeks taught. Hubris remains an issue today.  Most nations are lead by Committee, a central gang with a particularly physical world clever man who once was called the ‘big man’.  Some argue a small group of families rules.  Niall Ferguson’s The Square and Tower study of networks undermines most conspiracy theories as the world is a complex and interconnected as the neutrons and synapses of an individual brain which is said to have as many connections as stars in the galaxy.  We may well be looking at our own thoughts when we look at the sky. Apparently the Chinese put a rover on the dark side of the moon. Trust the communist to be ultra secretive.  If luck has it a new generation of spy novels will develop with Bruce Jenner playing an East Indian James Bond seeking an Oriental communist spymaster made by the Turkish film industry with Oprah as the new spy girl. Strange is the new reality.

The Hindu religions having no difficulty with reincarnation long argued that the ‘illusion’ or Moksha of this wis that the world is the ‘material’. The world is spiritual like the Gnostic movie, the Matrix.   Einstein argued that Energy and Mass were related solely by time and speed. Mass being slow energy.  

Christians believe in general that God created the world and that his Son Jesus elucidated the plan and purpose of creation.  We would be wise to follow his plan.  The scriptures give a glimpse of this.  The law of attraction as developed by Emmett Fox and other later Christians popular in California suggests what Pascal premised was true. Aetheists not wanting God die and that’s it. So it’s really best if they get all the toys and conquer and have baby temper fits and arrogantly spout nonsense because a loving God wouldn’t force an afterlife on such trolls.  Or are they baby souls who just refuse their soul food.

Christianity was  derived from the teachings of Jesus as observed and recorded by Luke,Mathew and Mark and later John.  St. Paul wasn’t an actual witness or confidant of physical Jesus and took his theological background from Judaism which had fundamental difficulty with the idea of a ‘servant king’ or a man who preached ‘love’.  St. Paul stoned the first Christian he could and only stopped stoning Christians when he was told by God not to.  He then spread churches and helped develop the Christian teachings into a sect that became a religion.  Jesus, by the way, did not say, spread churches.  The institutions and real estate and money and land are all interpretative. Jesus did say carry the message.  Theoretically this could have meant solely word of mouth or because Christians lived a certain way this way would spread. Indeed the Way remains the most threatening thing to the Secular Authorities. 

Constantine in 300 ad made Christianity the State Church of the Empire.  He wed the Christian teachings to the Greek and Roman Empire of the day.  He called the Council of Nicaea to begin the process of ‘orthodoxy’.  Prior to  c . 300 there was a lot more Christianity.  Even Paul and Peter disagree in the existing gospels.  Further when Jesus is questioned about people performing miracles in his name he doesn’t really get into splitting hairs but says if they are healing and doing good so be it. He does have his objections to the rich.  He says you “cannot serve both God and money”. That’s a direct quote. Ironically Jesus doesn’t talk about same sex marriages but he does talk about money and fear which are often not the topic of church sermons especially when there are insurance agents and bankers attending..

Do not be afraid was a principle ‘command’ of Jesus.  When I told a friend I was a Christian psychiatrist he said that was an oxymoron. Certainly Christian psychologists were not a necessity when Christianity was a more encompassing religion than a Sunday affair. Robert Graves in the Golden Bough discussed the purpose of all the religions of the world to the common man.  The superstitious role of the Christian pastor is as scapegoat. Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong showed clearly that the spiritual leader of the day in all religions, not just Christianity,  must support the material leader of the day or he was likely go the way of Thomas Beckett.

The  Council of Nicaea  rejected fundamental ideas about matter and god and spirit and human.  To be a state church orthodoxy the interpretations had to be made into law to give work for lawyers and beurocrats and ensure that religion followed the state power of the God Kings of the Day.  Constantine never stopped being a God King. Roman Emperor, he himself was a Sun Worshiper , not that original as God Kings go. Egyptian God Kings were always  the  party favourites.  Constantine’s Sun Worship was the reason for the Sabbath becoming Sun Day rather than traditional Hebrew Saturday. Jesus was liked by the Centurions. Aetheists aren’t particularly common in foxholes. Constantine was a warrior and he saw the soldiers of the Way were superior to pagan soldiers.  The Milvian Bridge clash won him the Roman Empire.

The question for the enlightened was if there was anything beyond the gospels in the first three hundred years of Christianity which might well have been what Jesus said but didn’t appeal to Constantine or church leaders or an empire builder like the wealthy Rabbi  Paul. The Gnostic Gospels were found and these suggested secret teachings but had a cloak and dagger feeling which is too much based on the political ways of the world, inclusive and exclusive.  Jesus said ‘if you have ears you will hear, not a secret society.  

The Good News was fairly inviting. Jesus said, “Follow Me’.  He also said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  See here, ‘deny themselves’ and ‘pick up their cross’.  That’s the rub.

The God of the Psalms who Jesus taught said  “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me I will answer. I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them with long life and give them my salvation.”

Aetheist materialism has a number of arcane beliefs which scientifically are seen as ‘hypothesis’, not ‘facts’ but ‘assumptions’.  No one except perhaps Justin Trudeau has been more scientifically illiterate than Lawyer Obama.  Merkel who trained as a scientist should be ashamed of herself but as an East German Stasi she really knows the power of deceit and fear. 

 In contrast Christian spirituality says historically this man and these men said this about reality and God and how can we reconcile what is seen and unseen. We seem to do just fine with WiFi but have more difficulty today with idea of Prayer.  

Physics with it’s string theory has no difficult with religion.  The vast majority of scientists and philosophers of all time had no difficulty with God.  Aetheists are a very tiny minority of very loud and often very angry depressed anxious people.  

Jesus said ,” Do not be afraid’.  Jesus said.”Pray”.  He actually taught prayer specifically.  

Good news.  The real world goes beyond death. The real world has greater depth and breadth than this ‘known’ world. The  male age of rationalism was followed by the female age of emotionalism and we are already in the  the most advanced age of intuition. Migration serves to dilute the age of Aquarius which was as terrifying to the war machine today as Christianity has always been.  

I wonder what the Emperor and Church Father’s and the Orthodoxy proponents suppressed of the teaching of the first three hundred years. It is clear that their ideas were rapidly challenged as the church proceeded to divide and grow almost imediately following the Council of Nicaea. The Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Catholic and the Coptic Christians were early divisions. The umbrella of the Church as a whole existed because each of the subsequent divisions were maintained as monasteries.  These divisions within the Christian world were seen in the Buddhist and Hindu Religions as with the Muslim political religion. The divisions are predictable in the orthodoxies. Each line of each Creed speaks to the divisions of early years.  Luther is a Johnny Come Lately.   

The history of spirituality argues that spirituality is like genius. It has a pure ness about it. There is a light which attracts insects.  This light can be either for earthly benefit or may be destroyed as potential risk to earthly power.   The Library of Alexandria might have been arson. Certainly the Vatican library long argued the place of ultimate censorship has everything about it that we ascribe to Roswell. 

The story of Jesus is a powerful teaching story what is claimed by the unenlightened as ‘merely’ ‘myth’ yet those who know might argue that as all is ‘myth’ the most powerful of ‘myths’ and indeed the most practical.  

Jesus Christ. 

I was in church today. Today was the Baptism of Jesus Day.  As a congregation we were asked to repeat our baptism vows.  We all qualified.  We’re in. We’re saved.  We need not be afraid.

I pray. The mystics teach that prayer and breath go together. The Dessert Fathers and St. Augustine taught the same.  Breathe. Pray.  Do not be afraid.  

Jesus Christ.  I am a spiritual being living in a material dream.  I am indeed a dreamer in God’s dream. I am made in the ‘image’ or ‘imagination of God’.  I am a spiritual being living in a spiritual world.  

St. John who baptized people in water was asked if he was the Christ. He said he wasn’t but that he was coming. He said the Christ would baptize in the Holy Spirit.  When St. John baptised Jesus in water he saw that God had baptised Jesus in the Holy Spirit.  There is a sense that such Love can be seen like a lightning which allows the visualization of the energy we call electricity.  Imagine seeing love. Perhaps only the blind do.

Do not be afraid. Pray. Jesus Christ.  Holy Spirit Come. 

God Seeking and God Sought

“I just have trouble with a notion of a God.” He said, seriously.

‘But the Big Bang is a kind of God,isn’t it. The latest name for ‘creator’ or ‘creation’. 

“I guess you could say but I don’t believe in this being of God interested in our affairs so to speak.” His hair was combed and he was well dressed, casually so but groomed. Soft spoken

“I get that but this experience I’m in might well be a God dream.” I said, “I know I’m not God but this may be God and like a program their may or may not be an administrator. That’s a whole other question.”

“Intellectually, I can’t disagree with that. I don’t know either way.” He said.

“ The issue of ‘faith’ is that you can’t experience something perhaps if you don’t believe in it. The scientific mind shows that. All that electron wave particle business.  I find the aetheist ‘closed minded’.  There’s simply no convincing her of anything not in her sensuality. The sensualism is sexy. There needs to be a crack in the comfort before you even question it. I don’t have any need per se to challenge them. But I feel a need to answer their arrogant assumption that there is no God. In this incredible universe of billions of stars you’re going to say there’s not even the possibility of a candy stripped polka dotted God of Gods, God almighty, It’s highly irrational to maintain such a position. But they do.”

“But religious people speak as if they know what God wants and says,” he rightly noted.

“Oh they do. Some are as big a wanker and aetheists are.  Arrogant.  Literalists.  Even the Bible must be interpreted. Collectively humans have been ‘told’ by God to ‘breathe’ and they do so at birth but beyond that there’s no absolute really.  Even understanding the meaning of love or lust is a matter of experience age and understanding.”

“But a baby could just ‘breathe’ without a command from God or programming from God,” he said. 

“  Mysticism is something different. The question I was asked is which is more likely, that I’m a material being living in a spiritual plane or a spiritual being having a material sojourn.  I’m rather fond of the latter idea. There is this God man thought.  I can imagine and dream infinity but live in this finitude. That’s not the reall bugbear bit.”

“What is?’ He asked, still curious.

“The bit that really caught me though was the whole notion that as I was seeking God, God was seeking me. That Hound of Heaven poem. The divine dance. God as lover.  God’s not lost. I’m lost. I hold with in me the sense of a home, of coming home and love is like that. It’s an intuition or feeling, not really intellectual. But you have to be willing. If you turn your back on this thing it’s not going away but there is a door and the door handle is on the inside. I know that much.  Do you see what I mean.”

“I guess, in a way,” he said.

“ I’m not making it very easy or clear. I’m sorry about that. But the experience doens’t lend itself to words any more than human love does. Better told with art or music. Or equations.  Cathedrals are my favourite expression. These days it’s sometimes more likely to experience something God like coming out of mathematics or physics. Scientists are  more religious in their string theories and quantum understanding. I fear the social function of the church, as important as it is, has over ridden the contemplative.  The community is good.  

Are you sure it’s God you have difficulty with more than people or yourself. I doubt God is that difficult or even complicated. Loving God ironically makes loving myself and others easier.” I said.  We left off there. Maybe we’ll speak again, sometime.   

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.

Jesus, Parables and Climate Change

“He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed . As he was scattering the seed some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty and a hundred times.”
Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables.  He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside, everything is said in parables so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven."
Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable?  How then will you understand any parable? The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time.  When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the demons of other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Others like the seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop - thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown." Mark 4, The BIBLE (NIV)

When I read this, I remember that a puzzle ceases being a puzzle once it is solved.  Jesus taught the Kingdom of God, the message simply, that there is a higher power, a heavenly power, that is more powerful than any earthly power.  I sometimes think of Heaven as “Haven”, a safe place.  The world around seems so often frightening.  I fear I’ve lived a life of anxiety.  But I was taught, "Anxiety is a measure of one’s distance from God and equally a measure of one’s humanity."
The great Christian theologian Kierkegaard taught, "Life is suffering unto death."  Christians believe that this finite world is of secondary purpose to the world to come, after death.  Scott Fitzgerald, the Christian psychiatrist, who wrote the Road Less Traveled, saw this existence for each man, a kindergarten.  Despite the moaning and groaning of students, the real work begins after school.  St. Paul taught that we had to put off the things of children though paradoxically Jesus taught we had to be like children to come before the Lord.  We had to be reborn.   St. Paul taught that now,  we ‘see through a glass darkly’.   The Celtic monks saw life as a journey which continued after death.
The Message of Jesus, first seek the Kingdom of God.  When we are fully awake we will see life and death as one.  We will also understand all that has passed as what was necessary to bring us to that point of transformation.  The catterpillar, no doubt like man, complains of all the horrible things that happen to this sluggish creature until one day the caterpillar becomes the butterfly and all that is past is forgotten.  As children we complained about our cribs and were angry with parents who made us go to school.  My dog doesn’t even like that I clean up his poop.  Children don’t like discipline any more than old ladies like doing sit ups.
Yet the greatest leaders were first the greatest followers.  For to learn one must let go of pre conceptions.  The parable about the seeds speaks to the closed minded, those whose minds are like the paths, pavement parking lot minds, where nothing gets in.  The Message of Love is entertained by all the glitzy crowds.  As adolescents we sang ,  “all we need is love’.  The romance novels proliferate.  I say I love you but like half of North Americans I’ve divorced and ‘justified’ it, and ‘rationalized’ it.  I’m like the debtors who want their ‘debt’ written off.  We all want a second chance.  In this life some are given countless chances while others die.  In this life there are layers of buffers for those with wealth and priviledge and private armies but with such power comes it’s own set of fears and anxieties.  Each of us has our own challenge each and every day but we prefer to deny our own part and point our fingers at others.  We blame and judge freely and are like those who receive the Word but only superficially.  As quickly as not we slip back like addicts who at the first or hundredth opportunity pick up a drink or drug or turn to porn, prostitutes or gambling.  There are no roots with us or them, then.. We didn’t let the seed grow deep because we were shallow thinkers and shallow people who wanted quick fixes and easy rewards.  Hollywood lies about the greatness of love of strangers.  It has repackaged lust as love. It claims in a thousand stories that this new  love is the like of the old love of friends who’ve been together 50 years in intimacy and work, creating lives of heroism and sacrifice and dynasties. Deceitful wealth taught us , “Sha, na, na, na,na, na Live for today”.  It was always such with children with credit cards who  didn’t work or had parents, slaves or other tax payers to pay for their folly.  It was a different message from Carpe Diem or another Jesus parable about keeping lamps lit. .
Erich From wrote the great little book Art of Loving which differentiated clearly  between falling in love and standing in love.  Jesus teaches that we must stand in love, let the Word grow within us, hold onto the Message, let time and nurturing allow for roots to take hold.  We must open ourselves.
Grace is the unwarranted gift of God.  Grace is like the sunshine. We have it. We have always had it. We don’t know why it’s there yet it gives us life.  Sun worship is one of the first spiritual experiences of humans collectively. Pagans have Sun Gods and Sun God worship.  Constantine who institutionalized Christianity, taking the teachings of Jesus and making them into a State Religion of the Roman Empire, which later became the Roman Catholic Church, was a Sun God worshiper.  This is why so much pagan Sun God symbolism and worship crept into the new Gentile/Israeli homogenized religion. Roman Catholicism to this day remains a State Religion, the Vatican, it’s own country with it’s own police, army , stamps and boundaries.  The Church of England, Anglicanism, Episcopalianism, is also a state church, though slightly more distinct from the nation state that founded it.
Jesus’ message was radical.  One of the challenges for the individual is to separate the true message of Jesus from the thorns of state and ‘deceitful wealth’ because the Church, especially the Catholic and the Anglican are intimately woven into the status quo of their associated State religion. .  The STATE killed Jesus.  The Political figures of Israel in it’s day and the political figures of the Empire killed Jesus.  They were satanic like the birds in the parables.   Great black crows and vultures that swooped down on the son of God and killed him in a time space extravaganza action movie of all time.
Then one day, the STATE, made an unholy alliance with the religion of man and the religion of God.  Much of Sun God worship still exists in this New Christianity of post Nicea.  The Nicene Creed is the agreement between STATE and Christians which saw the end of the persecution of Christians and allowed the politics to get on with making strange bedfellows.  All religions are the feet of spirituality. It is where God touches earth.  It’s the muck our faith grows from.  It is the outside. St. Theresa of Avila taught this well in her book, Inner Castle.
The Mystery is the darkness that is in all religions because man makes religions as he/she makes nations.  So the religion state of atheism is communism and the religion/state of the Roman Empire was paganism, then Catholicism, as the religion/state of Russia was once Orthodox Christianity.  The religion/state of the Islam was the Ottoman Empire which today is Saudi Arabia and Iran.  There is no separation of state and religion in the religion of aetheism in communism just as there is no separation of state and religion of the Church of England.  There’s a list of political martyrs who were Christians who disagreed with the powers of this earth and were sacrificed to deceitful wealth as were Jesus and St. Peter.  Thomas Crammer comes to mind and St. Oliver Plunkett. Christians are the most persecuted people of the earth today.  Yet if a woman questions the State Religion Book, the Koran and wants to be a leader, well, Isis will behead her too.
The atheists killed hundreds of millions in this last century , as did the Pagans under Hitler, with the Moslems are still having a bloody good time  today with their Internet hollywood  beheadings. The Christians live on in the United State American Empire,  a bit like they do in  the Post Christian , Post Britain English Empire. In Ankor Watt times the Buddhists and Hindus were whacking each other in the name of religion since state and religion separation is only a very modern idea, at most a century or three old.   Today’s secularism is a novelty which might well be considered a merger of Satan and God much like the birth of the Roman Catholic Empire. It’s hard to say.  Up close politics is never easy to read despite the sound bite silliness of propaganda media.
Decietful Wealth, promissory materialism is countered with ‘you can’t take it with you’ and the lie of Satan is that this world ends with death.  But if that were true Shakespeare’s Hamlet would not have been given the greatest parable of modern English, “To sleep, to dream, that is the rub.”  So the materialist would believe they don’t dream.  Even animals dream but atheists insist death isn’t a dream state for the individual even now when we have dream post brain death scientific evidence. The near death experiences of those who have returned miraculously to life were best recorded by Dr. Moody.  Yet Dr. Eben Alexander, the Neurosurgeon who died and resurrected like Lazarus published a book, Proof of Heaven and it falls like seeds on the parking lot minds of atheists.   Quantum Physics and String Theory teach us scientifically today  that the world may well be a great  Matrix, a Shrodinger Cat box of energy and matter, inner and outer, As the Bible taught we are created in the Image of God so the universe is much more than the imagination of God and we are co creators of this dream of life and death.  Information transferring under laws of conservation and spirituality.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Pray.
One can hear the terror in their voices of the promissory materialist atheists  as they switch their fear from their own imminent death and claim the planet is going to die,  a grandiose delusion if ever there was one.
I may die.  God does not die.  And if I die I will dream of God as God dreams of me.  But these are parables.  It’s hard to understand these things on the outside.  And the mystery is that I really don’t know individually if I am on the inside or the outside but there’s a sense that all is one.
The great painting on the Cistine Chapel is Adam reaching out to God and God touching his finger. Personally I am blessed to have seen this greatest work of the age by Michelangelo.  The sensual love   Leonardo Da Vinci's  Mona Lisa for her enigmatic smile may or may not offer a man sex or a child love. It’s that uncertain. But Adam and God reach towards each other and where Grace and Faith meet so sparks fly.  It's that certain.
And in the parable of the farmer, the seeds grow and multiply, 30 times, 60 times, a hundred times.  The Big Bang is within.
Turn and be forgiven!