A Ramble About Why God Permits Evil in the World

This is going to be a shorter Ramble than you might think. It is the number one problem of religious studies and the number one question of agnostics and atheists which causes even some of the hardiest believers to pause. “If there is a loving, good, all-powerful God, then why does He permit the evil and atrocities which happen in this world?”

There is a simple answer to this. He permits evil to exist in the world because to do otherwise would mean completely wiping the human race from existence. The human race is, as a species, insane in an otherwise sane and beautiful creation, and it doesn't take much pushing to bring out this insanity in the average person. Just take away the things, people, dreams, security, etc. which they have attached themselves to and it will bubble to the surface as we struggle to cope. It is this insanity which drives people to be selfish and without compassion. It is this selfishness which causes harm to ourselves, those around us, and the creation around us whether we see the immediate cause of the harm or not; and which causes us to blame everyone and everything else around us including God for the harm we do to ourselves. We, the insane human race, are the cause of evil in this world. The only way to totally eradicate evil is to totally eradicate the human race as we know it. In other words, evil is allowed to continue because of His mercy.

Furthermore, God respects our right to be individual beings with our own thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, and choices. In order for us to continue to exist physically, and eradicate evil, He would have to completely reprogram every one of us into completely different people without each person's individual consent, and this is something He will not do. His compassion for us, His love and respect for us as individual persons dictate that He allow us to be the people we are and make our own choices whether they are selfish or compassionate and to bear the consequences of either. Just as He will not wipe the whole human race from existence Himself, so He will not wipe the individual psyche from existence and forcibly reprogram the individual human brain. That would be tantamount to murder because the unique psyche of the individual person would be lost forever. He asks us to cooperate with Him in being transformed by His Grace, but only with our consent and cooperation; never by force.

There has been one time in our distant past when He nearly did eradicate evil from the world. It's an event recorded in every human cultural memory. The great flood almost completely destroyed us, and yet He chose to stay His hand from our annihilation. There have been times when He has culled us and our inventiveness in order to keep us from destroying ourselves and the rest of creation faster than it could have been, but He has never completely destroyed us.

Ultimately, we will end up destroying ourselves and the habitat He created for us through the consequences of billions if not trillions of our selfish choices over the last tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years of human existence. Until that happens He will continue to prune and cull to stave it off until there is nothing left to prune and cull, and He will continue to offer us a way to cooperate with Him with the end result of our individual salvation from destruction at our own hands.

The just judgment of God is to let us stand or fall by the consequences of the choices we make. His mercy is when He does damage control to mitigate those consequences so we don't end up completely destroyed either individually or as a species. But if we refuse to cooperate with Him, He respects our choices and lets us fall on our own swords, tears in His eyes as he is forced to watch it.

The worst part about our insanity is how it affects Him. We blame Him. We curse Him. We deny His very existence. We bring harm and violence to His good creation, and inflict it on ourselves, each other, and the non-human innocents and He is forced to watch it all, to know exactly what it feels like every time it happens to everyone and everything it happens to. We inflict our evil on Him too, and He continues to love us and show compassion and mercy even as we are hurting Him mercilessly.

God allows evil to continue because He loves us and cares about us, not because he doesn't. We're the ones who twist it around and blame Him for our own individual and collective evil.

A Ramble About Maleficent

I have known a great many women, at various stages of my life, who have been through abusive relationships and come out the worse for it. It has been my observation that women in general, no matter who it is, are protectors and nurturers by nature and it is only through pain and violence that this is twisted in them so that they become abusive and destructive.

I recently saw Maleficent, two or three times. I admit, I really liked this movie. It's a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story from the viewpoint of the villain, giving it a twist. Maleficent is, after all is said and done, the story of a woman abused by the man with whom she had a romantic relationship who finds redemption, forgiveness, and freedom in the love of her “goddaughter.”

In the movie, Maleficent starts as a little girl who befriends the boy who would grow to be the man, Stefan, who abuses her. We also see the imagery of horns and wings, symbolizing the capacity of this young girl to be either angelic, compassionate, and loving or demonic, angry, and vengeful. The two spend time together as they grow from pre-teen to adults over a period of several years.

But this young man has his own ambitions, and in order to achieve them he is willing to use their relationship to get close enough to her to kill her. But then, unable to go through with it, he saws her wings off while she is drugged to offer “proof” to a dying king that she has been killed. And then he leaves her damaged, angry, and in pain.

As she began the story with the potential to be either angel or demon, her wings are torn from her and she is literally an outcast from heaven through no fault of her own. Angry and bitter she lashes out at the man who hurt her by cursing the daughter, the product of Stefan's ambitions, he has with the woman who replaced her.

This unnamed woman is the daughter of the king whom the man married in order to become king himself. So she is also the incarnation of the man's ambitions. How many men throw their wives and loved ones away for the sake of their careers? It wasn't the woman he wanted as much as the kingship she represented, and, when he has what he wants from her, he throws her away too and leaves her to die from an unnamed illness while he himself descends into madness.

As the young princess grows up in seclusion, Maleficent finds herself caring for the girl throughout her life (because her three fairy “aunties” are completely inept), making sure she is fed and kept safe. A maternal bond forms between them and the girl's love and compassion becomes Maleficent's salvation as she begins to open up her heart again to let the girl in. Maleficent tries desperately and powerfully to revoke the curse she has placed on the girl, but as is so often the case in life, what she set in motion through her bitter desire for revenge against Stefan and his ambitions can't be undone so simply.

In turn Maleficent's maternal love for the princess she cursed becomes the girl's own salvation from that curse. In this story, the kiss of true love doesn't come from a prince Aurora met only once, but from the single motherly kiss on the forehead of her “godmother” who loved and cared for her all of her life.

In the final scenes, Maleficent is confronted by Stefan who is now completely out of his mind and obsessed with destroying her, surrounding himself with steel and iron which she can't touch or else she will be burned. He is completely oblivious and uncaring to the fact the Maleficent is the one who saved his daughter from the eternal sleep. She is surrounded by his iron-clad soldiers who are just waiting for him to deliver the death blow.

It is here also where it is the love of her “goddaughter” which saves Maleficent from murder at Stefan's hands, because it is Aurora who finds and releases Maleficent's wings which, sensing her presence in the castle, fly fast and furious to be rejoined with their owner. And then we see Maleficent made whole and rising like an avenging angel, no longer the villain, trying to protect Aurora from her father's madness. In the final scene is a struggle between Stefan and Maleficent at the top of the castle, and then they both topple off. Maleficent's wings, her angelic nature, catch her as he tries to drag her down with him, but Stefan continues his final plunge alone and dies. Maleficent, and also Aurora, are finally freed from the abuser.

As I think about this movie now, I can't help but think of all the women out there who have, like Maleficent, been abused by the men who had promised to love them. The women who are hurt, and angry, and who lash out at innocents trying to punish the men who hurt them. This is the cycle of abuse, and the only thing which breaks that cycle, as in the movie, is love, forgiveness, and compassion.

Maleficent, who was a protector and nurturer, was abused, and so in her pain she became an abuser instead of a protector. And it was only through the plight of a motherless, innocent girl who needed to be protected and nurtured that she was able to turn back from her destructive path to the light from the darkness. It was only through her choice to love this innocent girl who symbolized everything which had hurt her that she began to heal the damage which had been done to her and the damage which she had done in her bitterness.

After all is said and done, this is truly where healing from abuse must begin. Not with waiting for someone else to love you, but with the hard path of choosing to love in spite of the abuse.  

A Ramble About Evidence

Today I just felt drained. I finally got hired for part time work with an event security company here in Orange County. It's not much, but it's at least a paying job. So, the past couple of days I have been preoccupied with getting to an interview (not realizing that the bus didn't go far enough down the street I needed it to and having to walk the extra mile or two), putting together clothes for a uniform, and attending an orientation yesterday morning. This morning it felt like all I could do to just pray for the two services our church holds on Sundays.

I spent most of today just browsing Facebook, checking the news online, and watching some clips from Youtube. One of the pictures on Facebook caught my eye. It was of a series of chat messages between a friend of a friend and an atheist whom this friend of a friend had never met before. She had posted it for those friends and friends of friends who might find it interesting. I fell into the latter category and read through it.

This person wrote, in reference to religion:

Not exactly, I'm just saying its a flawed system all together and I for a long time felt horrible because I didn't believe in a religion and I tried very hard but I realized that this is who I am and what a believe, beyond that the logistics of religion are ridiculous and illogical, and everyone always says you don't need logic and things but it's important. And I'm not saying that I know exactly what's going t happen when I die if there is a god (which I don't believe there is) and if it's the Christian God I will gladly and easily go to hell because I don't want to be in a heaven that won't accept people for who they are or for what they believe no matter the type of person they are

Everyday because I'm atheist people tell me I'm going to somewhere I don't even believe in, and I would like to think that if there was a heaven I would get into it because I'm a nice person with good morals but apparently not

This what I believe and I get people making assumptions everyday about how I live my life and honestly I don't deserve what I get

(reprinted from a photo posted on Facebook, author unknown)

If nothing else, this is a good, honest explanation of where this person is at. If we were to get technical, I wouldn't classify this person as an atheist, but as an agnostic. They were willing to give the existence of God or a god a shot, and couldn't find verifiable evidence to back it up in their experience. It sounds like the person may still be open to the possibility of God with the right evidence. In my opinion, I don't think the failure is necessarily with the person who wrote this as much as it lies with the “evangelists” who represented the Christian faith and the existence of God to this person.

For me, the idea the God might not exist is ridiculous. It is more ridiculous than if someone were to tell me my wife didn't actually exist but she was a figment of my imagination (hey, you watch Matrix enough and it can start to play philosophical games with your head about the nature of reality). I've had an experiential relationship with Him now for many, many years and have seen His movements, answers to prayer that cross the miracle border and then some, and sensed and been aware of His presence in ways so deeply intimate and unmistakable that His existence just isn't a question for me. I know Him in the same way that I know my wife, or my kids, or the friend from college that I've known for twenty years (although I hear from Him a lot more than the friend from college). I know Him well enough now to know something of generally why He does what He does, and why He's likely to not do something. I can't usually predict what He's going to do. There're too many factors involved in His decision making for me to handle. He still surprises me all the time, and I'm never going to fully understand Him (that is physically impossible), but we do have that kind of a relationship.

The author of the chat text doesn't. For whatever reason, he or she doesn't have the kind of experience or evidence of God that I and many others do. Just telling this kind of a person to “believe and then you'll see” doesn't fly with him or her. It's a useless, and potentially harmful cliché which, as in this person's case, when it doesn't work in their opinion causes them to distance themselves even further.

This kind of person needs to see the evidence of God. With Jesus, His apostles, and many of the Saints throughout history part of this evidence took the form of demonstrations of power, miraculous healings, even resurrection from the dead. This became undeniable evidence of the truth of what they said. Of course, even this kind of evidence was challenged by those who found it threatening their positions (see Pharisees and the Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit). To this day, even many Christians challenge the veracity of miracles performed by the Saints of the Church because such miracles threaten their interpretation of Holy Scripture and Gospel truth. Here's a question, how can we point to the evidence God supports us with to prove our claims, when we refuse to accept it ourselves?

The other kind of evidence that Jesus, the Apostles, and the Saints of old demonstrated was the evidence of their lives. They weren't just good people. The sacrificed themselves and their desires to obey, move closer to and be with the God who loved them and whom they loved. They did this being motivated and empowered by His uncreated energies which also, coincidentally, powered the more visually flashy evidence of His presence. People saw that there wasn't just something a little bit different about them. They saw they they were from a whole 'nother world and were eager to get back to it. They saw that they refused to be assimilated into this world, this world hated them for it, and the feeling was mutual. They saw the unreasonable compassion, lovingkindness, and self-sacrifice which bordered on insanity to the point that these people were singing praises to God as they were crucified, burned alive, torn apart by lions and skinned alive.

The person who wrote that chat text hasn't seen any of this from those who claim to be witnesses who have evidence of the presence of God and the truth of their religious faith. This isn't his or her fault. He or she shouldn't be expected to want to “become a Christian” based on the strength of someone's condemnation of their assumed lifestyle, especially if the person “witnessing” isn't acting or living any differently than he or she is.

Why would any sane person want to belong to a church or religious group that doesn't have the evidence to back up their claims? Why should we expect them to “just believe” when we don't even pretend to act like we believe, let alone actually believe and act on it? This is not the failure of the honest atheist or agnostic. This is a failure of the dishonest “Christian.”

I do not know if I will ever run into the person who wrote this text, but I want to thank them for their honesty. I hope, I truly hope, that if I ever do meet them that I will not have to say one word for them to understand the presence of God around and within me. If I do have to say anything, then I had better keep my mouth closed anyway. If God doesn't support my claim to faith without my saying anything, then He and I need to have a serious talk, and I have a lot of explaining to do.

A Ramble About Kung Fu Pastors

This is a subject which, in my experience, most people really don't seem to understand or get. There is a profession which really requires years of study and hands on experience. The training for it often requires personal and financial sacrifices which can leave the student in financial debt in the many tens of thousands of dollars. The moral standards to which the student is held are absolute. When this professional level is finally achieved, the person is often asked to work for near minimum wage, or no salary at all, and they are expected to be fine with it. To top it off, just about everyone else who hasn't spent the time, effort and money studying and practicing generally believes they know more about this profession than the person licensed to practice it, and most disregard his advice and instruction when it suits them.

Do you know what this profession is? Talk to your pastor. He'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

Everyone seems to think they are able to interpret the Holy Scriptures, and instruct others in the path of Jesus Christ better than those actually trained to do it, and the less experience they have as a Christian, the more able they believe themselves to be. I know, I used to do it too. Chances are if you're reading this, so did you at one time.

It's not a new problem. St. Neilos writes about it in the early fifth century:

There is another thing which in my opinion is truly disgraceful, and for which with good reason we are ridiculed by all. When someone has just entered the monastic life and has learnt merely about the outward practices of asceticism – how and when monks pray, what they eat and how they dress – at once he claims to teach others concerning things he has not mastered himself. He goes about with a bevy of disciples, although himself still needing instruction; he thinks it easy to be a spiritual guide, not realizing the care of all men's souls is of all things the most difficult. … To master any art requires time and much instruction; can the art of arts alone be mastered without being learnt? No one without experience would go in for farming; not would someone who has never been taught medicine try to practice as a doctor. The first would be condemned for making good farmland barren and weed infested; the second, for making the sick worse instead of better. The only art which the uninstructed dare to practice, because they think it the simplest of all, is that of the spiritual way. What is difficult the majority regard as easy; and what Paul says he has not yet apprehended, they claim to know through and through, although they do not know even this: that they are totally ignorant. This is why the monastic life has come to be treated with contempt, and those who follow it are mocked by everyone. For who would not laugh when he sees someone who yesterday served in a tavern, posing today as a teacher of virtue, surrounded by pupils? … If such people realized clearly how much painful toil is required to guide others on the spiritual way, and if they knew the risks involved, they would certainly abandon the task as beyond their powers. But because they remain ignorant of this and regard it as a glory to be the guide of others, they will when the moment comes tumble headlong into the pit. (St. Neilos the Ascetic, c. 415 AD, pp. 215-216, The Philokalia The Complete Text, Vol. I, compiled by St. Nikodomos of the Holy Mountain, Palmer, G.E.H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, ed. and trans., New York: Faber and Faber, 1979)

What is truly exasperating is that when the educated and trained pastor tries to point out his education and training as actually qualifying him to do his job, the uneducated and untrained person uses that pastor's education and training against him as though it disqualified him completely! And heaven help the poor pastor if he makes a mistake like losing his temper!

Here's the thing, the Christian faith and rule of life is, first and foremost, a discipline of practice which has to not only be taught, but learned through experience and repetition like a martial art for example. You have to do it over and over again before it becomes ingrained to where you no longer consciously think about it but you just instinctively react that way. This cannot be acquired instantly or through a brief observation. It would be like the nine year old boy who goes to watch an action movie and comes away believing he knows kung-fu because he remembers more or less the movements which the actors made in the movie. When he attempts to show off his new found skills, the clumsiness of his movements demonstrate to everyone that he has no idea what he's doing. So it is with the “disciple” who merely observes or reads about how a Christian is to act and then believes he has arrived. There is also the added problem of the person only observing or reading about “Christians” who themselves are like that nine year old boy. The rule of faith and practice then degenerates into some kind of ridiculous farce which barely, if at all, resembles the original, “Grace”-ful art.

The nine year old who truly wants to learn kung fu will have his parents take him to a training center with someone who has spent the years necessary to master his art (which is actually what “kung fu” means). He will take his place humbly and patiently as a learner and go through the hard work of learning each movement by painfully repeating it over and over again, programming his muscles to respond without thought. He will make painful mistakes, and likely get hurt in the process. He will learn to heal and go right back into training. He will spend years doing this, disciplining his body and mind to where they act in concert. So it is with the person who truly wants to follow the path of Jesus Christ.

Pastors will make mistakes even though they may have been practicing for many years. This doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing. It means they're still under constant demonic attack from temptations and thoughts trying to insinuate themselves within them, and still haven't reached the full maturity of the resurrection yet any more than you or I have. Even St. Paul in Philippians 3 said he hadn't yet achieved this at the time he wrote it.

It is true that there are some pastors who's heads are filled with knowledge, have gone through all the seminary training, and still don't seem to know what they're doing. It is equally true that there are a few that don't seem to have gone through any formal training at all, and yet appear near Sainthood. From my experience (take it as you will), both situations tend to be in the minority.

Although many pastors today tend to avoid using the title “Reverend”, as a pastor friend of mine once said, there's a reason why it's there. It means that person has dedicated a significant amount of the latter part of his life to studying and practicing the faith of Jesus Christ in the best way he knows how, and has done so all so he can pass what he learns on to you through training and discipleship.

Even if he doesn't appear to have it all together, unless he's in known, serious sin, he deserves at least your respect and has earned the right through trials and testing to be thought of as knowing what he's talking about.

A Ramble About Why God Puts Us Where He Does

Many years ago when I was still in Bible School in Wisconsin, an old friend in my class once told me, “God isn't so concerned about the work of a worker as He is about the work in a worker.” A few years later, he amended his statement to say, “The work of God is the worker.”

I was reflecting on this as I was taking a shower this morning (sorry for the disturbing image). Sometimes it doesn't seem fair when I think I'm doing everything I know how to do to follow Christ and minister to those whom He brings my way, and yet He still won't open up the door yet for a paying job, no matter how many applications and interviews, much less a paid pastoral position. It's still humiliating when someone offers to buy groceries or necessities for my family and I because they believe they have to.

And yet, I am constantly placed into positions where I seem to be at the right place and the right time to give Jesus to the right person in the way they need it. He doesn't need to use me to do this, but He chooses to do so, not for His own benefit, or even necessarily for the benefit of the other person, but for mine.

It is the same with the mega-church pastor of tens of thousands, or the tiny church pastor of mere tens, or the missionary overseas who has malaria and can barely feed his own kids, or the missionary overseas who is living in a two story Victorian home and has a six figure annual donation. No one of us is in the position we're in because we're the most qualified or because we have something better to offer than someone else. God places us into the positions we're in because it's the most efficient way to mature us and bring us closer to His goal of union with Him.

So he places the mega-church pastor where he's at because sooner or later the man will discover he's a sinner and prove it to everyone else who's watching him. In other words, God does this to humble the person towards maturity. He puts me where I'm at so that I'm forced to trust Him, practice moderation, poverty, and obedience under stress, and get to the point where the only home I feel I have is Him. It is the same for every other minister. We don't get the jobs we do because we can do the best job at it. We get the jobs we do because they're the best for us. He doesn't need us to do them. We need us to do them in order to grow. It's a matter of learning obedience, humility, and shedding the attachments to the world which cling to us.

God's biggest goal and concern for us is, and will always be, that we know Him and cooperate with Him. He wants us to be brought to maturity in deification. Compared to this, He could care less about anything else regarding our comfort, stability, or personal successes. As our Father, He really can't do any less. It's similar to me and my kids. My biggest concern for them isn't their happiness. It's that they grow and mature into responsible, compassionate followers of Jesus Christ because I know that in the long view, their happiness and worldly successes are going to come and go, and won't last. So as a responsible parent, my first priority for them has to be what's permanent, not what's transient.

I don't know if I'm really at the point yet where I've got the self-discipline to live how God wants me to live without the external pressures and stresses, but God does and as a responsible parent He acts towards me accordingly. Unfortunately, like a bratty teenager, I kick and scream against His discipline more often than I care to admit. But I can see in my own life that His discipline is beginning, finally, to take some hold on me, and that He was right to enforce it.

We all mature and grow towards His upward calling at our own pace. There really isn't any way to hurry it up. There was a time when I thought that if I just tried to comply and do everything I thought He wanted me to, then I wouldn't have to go through His maturation process. This is a child's reasoning, no matter how well intentioned, and it doesn't work. My kids at times reason this way, and while it may keep them out of worse trouble than otherwise, it won't spare them from having to mature the hard way through time, failure, and experience.

It is through the work God places us in that we learn to emulate our Lord in emptying ourselves, taking the form of a slave, and dying a criminal's death in our pursuit of union with Him. This, and not the “ministry” is the most important work God will ever have us engaged in, and if we don't focus on this first, then any amount of “ministry” work we do is for nothing where we ourselves are concerned, and that is an unacceptable outcome to God.

A Ramble About Permissions

In my previous A Ramble About the Transmigration of the Soul I said this:

“Computer processors are made up of billions of transistors. The human brain is essentially a very complex, dynamic organic computer processor. If you've ever seen a picture of a neuron, of which the brain is made up of billions if not trillions, it resembles and functions much like a transistor. A transistor is essentially an electronic switch that uses an electrical impulse to either permit or deny the passage of an electrical current. It forms the basis of all logic circuits, which are the core of all computing devices in existence. Albeit a very highly sophisticated and complex transistor, the neuron is essentially a transistor nonetheless. Like the computer's processor, it functions by the transmission of electrical impulses along pathways of neurons. Inside a computer, these impulses are coded as “1” and “0” for “on” and “off”, if we could describe the internal coding of the neural pathways, it would probably not look much different in its simplest written form.

This internal coding of the human brain (the electrical impulses which course through our neural pathways) is essentially, for all intents and purposes, the human psyche or soul. It is the set of instructions which are formed from the input it receives through the five senses from its experiences and memories. It is programmed, compiled, and run on a single processor which is absolutely unique in terms of the internal arrangement of its “transistors” because every human brain, because of its organic nature and the way in which it forms and grows and changes throughout the course of a person's life, is absolutely unique.”

I had an interesting thought based on this understanding as to why one has only this life in which to repent and cooperate with God through Jesus Christ. It is only in this life and body where cellular change occurs. This body requires it in order to function normally. An organism which does not have regular cell death and regeneration is a dead organism. And organism with uncontrolled cellular regeneration has cancer.

When the body dies, the "software", that is the electrical impulses which make up the memories, thoughts, and personality of the person, is uploaded into a kind of emulator in order to keep it running until it can be downloaded back into a resurrected body. This much I've already described in the aforementioned Ramble.

One of the properties of certain computer files and programs is called “permissions”, Essentially, you can set a file that you create in such a way so that only you are able to make any changes to it, or even see it at all. This is called making a file “read-only.” On my computer, file permissions can be set so that even the administrator, the person who's supposed to be able to access and make necessary changes to the whole system, may not be able to rewrite them, but only the person who created the file.

In the case of a human being's conscious person, that person's coding is written by the person himself through his interaction with the external world and the processing of his own conclusions and calculations. When the person dies, the only one who has the rightful permission to alter the coding is the person that the coding itself describes. God respects our free will and conscious decisions so much that He will not make any alterations to it that the person himself does not authorize.

As a result, the coding, the software, outside of the natural physical body is "read-only" and unalterable so that the conscious person isn't lost in any way. Once the software is downloaded again into a resurrected, immortal, deified body and brain, it is still effectively "read-only" because the immortal body will not undergo cellular death and regeneration. The resurrected brain is like booting a computer from a live CD instead of from a hard drive. The data on a hard drive is magnetically positioned and so can be rewritten, but the data on a CD is fixed by a laser punching miniscule holes in a thin piece of metal foil. You can use the computer, access the programs, surf the net, play solitaire, etc, but you just can't. save anything or make changes to the OS because the boot disk is unable to be rewritten (a live CD is one option, for example, for using a computer without ever having to worry about virus infection or unwanted changes to the system).

One friend of mine questioned about Alzheimer's or dementia patients being locked into that state after death. But, unless I'm much mistaken, the memories and personality of said persons are still intact, but unable to be accessed as is demonstrated with reported "moments of clarity." Furthermore, if God is capable of uploading a human consciousness, certainly He's capable of repairing coding without making unauthorized changes to it.

This also may explain the reported behavior of ghosts (that is, those that can't be proven to be hoaxes or fraudulent in some way). In most cases, the ghost appears to not be aware that any changes have been made to its surroundings or the people which it tries to interact with. This would make sense if the ghost was a human consciousness uploaded as “read-only”, with no permissions given to alter the coding.

Finally, there appears also to be a difference with those who deliberately choose to follow Christ, giving Him permissions to make whatever changes He sees fit. That process of treatment of the human psyche for its inherent disorder, which requires changes to it, continues past the moment of physical death until the person is completely transformed to be like Christ, that is, deified and ready to be downloaded back into a resurrected body. God had already been given permissions through that person's explicit consent and cooperation to make the necessary and final changes prior to the person's physical death.

Thus, after physical death, the consequences of our choice to not cooperate with God by obeying the Gospel of Jesus Christ become unalterable. For God to "change" the person's software in the emulator or in the resurrected body without authorization would be to alter the person against their will, and He won't do that. It has to be our choice to obey or not.

(possible corroboration - here.) 

A Ramble About "Left Behind"

Recently, I was asked my opinion on a blog post about the Rapture. It seems that there is a new Left Behind movie coming out, and so the topic of the Rapture seems to be coming up a little bit more. Personally, I don't understand why someone's rebooting this franchise. The first Left Behind movie seemed close enough to the book, was decently acted, and, as I understand it, did okay financially being followed by two more movies in the same series (which were direct to DVD and didn't seem to do as well). I don't know why a studio would believe that if they gave it a bigger budget and more well known actors that they'd achieve a higher return on their investment than the first one, especially given the limited audience to which it's catering.

The blog post I was asked about looked at the passage in Matthew 24:40, which the movie poster for the reboot cited. This passage is often used by supporters of a pre-millenial, pre-tribulation rapture to prove their interpretation from Holy Scripture. It reads:

“At that time two will be in the field, the one [person] is taken and the one is let go.” (my lit. trans.)

A similar passage in Luke 17:34-35 is brought up by the blogger:

“I say to you, in this night two will be on one bed, one person will be taken and the other will be let go. Two women will be grinding on the same [night], the one will be taken and the other will be let go.” (my lit. trans.)

The bloggers take on these passages was that Jesus was referring, not to the end times rapture, but to the Roman holocaust which brought about the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, and resulted in the dissolution of the Jewish province of Judea and the fatal last stand (and mass suicide) at Masada in 73 AD. Jesus in saying that one would be taken and the other let go, in the blogger's view, referred to one being caught and killed by the Roman legions and the other one escaping the slaughter.

Upon reading the blogger's take, and seeing his logic, I concurred with his assessment. In the context of the whole passage, his take on it in its literal, historical, grammatical context made more sense than to associate these verses with the rapture. It was actually one of the best exegetes on a passage that I had read in a long time.

This got me to thinking more generally about different passages in the Scriptures and how we are taught to see them. When I was in Bible School, we were taught a very specific interpretation of certain passages (the “rapture” passages in question among them). It came to the point where I couldn't see those passages apart from that interpretation, regardless of whether or not it was in context. What's ironic about this is that the school I was trained in, and the churches I attended, were very heavily self-proclaimed “scripture only” Bible churches and organizations that scorned the use of a “Sacred Tradition” in the interpretation of Scripture, and yet it was a (shaky) tradition which was used, even mandated, to interpret those passages in question. For example, the teaching of a pre-tribulation rapture was not to be qestioned. Any other interpretation of Holy Scripture was considered anathema (and one could be threatened with expulsion if they didn't comply).

As I was weaned away from my Evangelical Protestant training, I had to learn to be able to disassociate those interpretations from the passages in question and to look at them without the theological baggage which was imposed on them. In other words, I had to unlearn how to think about those passages and what they meant. It's taken years for me to unlearn all the mistaken (and sometimes forced) interpretations and links between verses and passages and to just let the text speak for itself in the context of the surrounding verses and passages, and the linguo-socio-cultural context in which they were written.

Where a pre-tribulation rapture is concerned, there's little doubt that it's a relatively recent innovation dating from no earlier than the 1700s, and was really made popular and widespread only in the 1830s. It was unheard of in the ancient Church, where the Church Fathers were explicit that they expected for Christians to go through the time of tribulation and then those who remained faithful to Christ would be transformed, deified while still living, joining those who were resurrected from the dead and deified. They believed this because it was the explicit teaching and understanding of the Apostles as is reflected in their writings, the New Testament.

If we're going to learn from the Holy Scriptures, we have to let them speak for themselves and not force interpretations which we agree with on them. We have to learn to speak their language, and not they ours. When we force the Scriptures to say what we want them to say, then the resulting text is no longer the word of God, but the word of us. And when we force our own word on those trying to understand the Holy Scriptures, then we truly are leaving them behind.

The blogpost to which I was referring.

A Ramble About the Transmigration of the Soul

One of the things I used to like to do in my spare time, though not so much as I get older, is to go back and play old console games. These are the video games I grew up with on the old Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy, and the Sega Genesis. You can usually find them online through various means (some not as reputable as the others).

The main problem with trying to play these kinds of games is that they weren't written for x86 or x86_64 processors, which is what most if not all laptops, desktops, and a fair number of hand-helds use to do the calculations to make the whole thing work. In order to run them on a standard computer, you need what's called an emulator program. An emulator is a piece of software which uses computer code to make the program think it's running on the processor or hardware it was written and compiled for.

Computer code is normally written in human readable “programming language” and then is run through what is called a compiler to turn the human readable instructions into something the processor, which can only understand instructions given to it in binary (1s and 0s), can follow. What is compiled for one kind of processor will not run on a different kind of processor. The arrangement of transistors within the two different kinds of processors are mathematically different from one another. It doesn't matter if the code is binary or not, the different processor will produce gibberish as it tries to run the calculations which the instruction set of the program is trying to give it. This is the reason why, way back when, software companies often would sell two separate versions of the same program, one for the PC and one for the Mac. The PCs ran the Windows OS on an x86 processor, and the Mac ran the Mac OS or OS X on a PowerPC processor. If you tried to install a copy of MS Office for Windows on an old Mac, it would look at you and go “huh?” And that's if it was being polite.

Follow me so far? There is a point this beyond computer geek nostalgia.

Computer processors are made up of billions of transistors. The human brain is essentially a very complex, dynamic organic computer processor. If you've ever seen a picture of a neuron, of which the brain is made up of billions if not trillions, it resembles and functions much like a transistor. A transistor is essentially an electronic switch that uses an electrical impulse to either permit or deny the passage of an electrical current. It forms the basis of all logic circuits, which are the core of all computing devices in existence. Albeit a very highly sophisticated and complex transistor, the neuron is essentially a transistor nonetheless. Like the computer's processor, it functions by the transmission of electrical impulses along pathways of neurons. Inside a computer, these impulses are coded as “1” and “0” for “on” and “off”, if we could describe the internal coding of the neural pathways, it would probably not look much different in its simplest written form.

This internal coding of the human brain (the electrical impulses which course through our neural pathways) is essentially, for all intents and purposes, the human psyche or soul. It is the set of instructions which are formed from the input it receives through the five senses from its experiences and memories. It is programmed, compiled, and run on a single processor which is absolutely unique in terms of the internal arrangement of its “transistors” because every human brain, because of its organic nature and the way in which it forms and grows and changes throughout the course of a person's life, is absolutely unique.

Do you see where this conclusion leads yet?

The human psyche cannot transmigrate from one brain to another. It can only be run on the processor, the brain, in which it was originally compiled and run. Reincarnation, or the transmigration of the soul, in this sense, is impossible. It can however be run on an emulator and preserved, just as those old games could be stored and run on emulators specifically written for that type of program. And it should be able to be reinstalled and run on a processor, a human brain, which is precisely identical to the one in which it was originally compiled.

The Christian faith does not teach the transmigration of the soul. This teaching has always been preached against by the Fathers of the Church. But it does, and has always taught, the resurrection of a body identical to the one the person lost. To continue using our analogy, God is perfectly capable of uploading the human psyche into an emulator within a virtual reality until that new, identical body is completed and ready for reinstallation. Even if God were to recompile the code for a different brain and body, it would change the person completely and it would no longer be the same psyche. The original person would be lost. But no one would be lost from existence if He merely uploaded and stored the psyche and then reinstalled it into a physically identical system. And God is not willing that anyone should perish.

Just some thoughts.

A Confession About What Other People Think

Recently, I took one of those random Facebook tests which a friend shared. I've begun to do this more just for fun to see what they say about me. For that reason alone, this particular test turned out to be ironic. This particular test was to determine what your sub-conscious was obsessed with. What was unique about this one is that it asked you to pick a picture that reminded you of a certain thing or feeling.

Being a semi-educated person, I know I shouldn't put too much stock in the answer, but the minute I saw it the answer stabbed at me. The reason why it bothered me so much is that I know it's true. The answer it gave me was that my sub-conscious was obsessed with what others think of me.

The truth is that this is kind of a tough thing for me to admit. It's embarrassing, because after everything I've written in my Rambles and elsewhere about the necessity of detachment and letting go, the implication is that, subconsciously, I'm attached to the opinions of others and doing things to gain the approval of other people. In the back of my mind, I'm obsessed with what I think other people are saying about me.

The thing is, I know this is at least partly true. I am, and have always been, insecure about what others think of me because of the many times I was told how bad of a person I was as a kid by classmates, teachers and other adults. This is another reason too why the extreme difficulty I have with trying to find paying employment is so painful for me. Every time someone accuses me of just not wanting to work or wanting to just take from others hurts and only reinforces that insecurity. Even my pursuit of the ministry was to some extent partly motivated by this insecurity to prove to everyone, including myself, that I wasn't rotten or worthless. I wanted to get as far away from that person “whom I used to be” as possible.

This past spring, I wrote this as a status update:

“Of all the things that we must renounce, one's own personal self-image is the hardest. This is especially true if one believes that he is a good person. I know that my own psyche fights to protect this self deception which I have as a good, even godly person regardless of all the evidence to the contrary. My psyche moves instinctively to protect itself by ignoring, arguing with, or outright suppressing such contradictory evidence. In my case, I grew up being told how bad of a person I was, but not wanting to be. The evidence usually agreed with this assertion. I have since, unconsciously, spent most of my adult life trying to prove to myself and everyone else that I was not, and failed at it miserably. Now, without the delusion of this false self image I am forced to observe myself as I am, as the evidence points. And I am forced to do nothing, because there is nothing I can do to contradict the evidence of my own thoughts, actions, words, and feelings. I believe that this is a necessary process for my own progress. The cross means total renunciation. Deep, thorough, and complete. Not even what I want to believe about myself can be spared.”

Tonight, I got hit in the face with it again as my insecurity was held up to me like a mirror. A friend on Facebook posted a link to a blog post which rubbed me the wrong way. When I attempted to express where I differed, the author of the blog post commented, strongly implying that I didn't know what I was talking about and that my personal relationship with Christ was in question. Suffice it to say that I didn't respond well. As I think about it now after the fact, what probably went through my sub-conscious mind was something like, “I can't let everyone else who reads this think this about me!”

My final response went through several revisions as my first impulse was to list my “credentials” to not only prove that I knew what I was talking about, but also to put him in his place. However, the Holy Spirit kept hitting me in the face with the same simple truth that the Facebook quiz revealed. I was reacting to the assault on my perceived self-image. I didn't feel like I could let it go without correcting the image he was painting of me, and this was because of my own inherent insecurity about what other people think of me. My heavily revised final comment, hopefully, wasn't quite so focused on me trying to prop up a certain image of myself for a man whom I didn't even know.

The problem here is that I, sub-consciously, so crave approval I didn't get as a kid that any assault on my perceived self-image now is taken by my psyche as a threat. The deception in this is that my self-image, any self-image, is a facade I project or seek to project. This person that constitutes “me” is constantly changing and far more complex that the false facade I might try to defend.

Furthermore, my self-image is a moot point. It's smoke or a mirage and matters less than both. I will die, and I will face judgment. It doesn't matter what I delude myself into thinking that “self” is supposed to be. The only thing which matters is my mortality and standing before our Lord in judgment. In baptism I have died with Jesus Christ, being joined to Him in His death through baptism. Propping up the facade for people's approval is kind of pointless in relationship to that.

The hardest thing about this insecurity is knowing that even if I get people's approval, it will never be enough. I know this because it never is. My psyche is always pushing me on it. As I continue to follow the path of Jesus Christ I will meet with less and less approval from other people. Because of the faulty attachment to the opinion of others which I possess, this will always cause me pain until I am disciplined to detach myself from this craving. Until this, this pain cannot be helped if I want to continue to press towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Thoughts on Attachments and Loss

Attachment or aversion leads to fear. Attachment to an object, idea, outcome or person leads to fear because of loss. Loss is inevitable because of change. Everything subject to time experiences change, therefore everything subject to time is eventually lost, and thus all people will experience the loss of all objects, ideas, outcomes, or people either during their lifetimes or upon their own physical death as the immaterial part of the psyche is separated from its connection to the material world through the physical body.

When we are attached to a thing or person we believe that we need that thing or person for our survival. We tell ourselves we cannot live, be happy, be successful, etc. without that thing or person and become afraid at the idea of losing the object of our attachment as though it threatens our personal survival.

Aversion to an object, idea, outcome or persn also leads to fear. We do not fear the loss of the object of our aversion, but the acquisition of it. We believe that acquiring this object, idea, person, or outcome would in some way be harmful to our continued survival. Acquisition, like loss, is inevitable and uncontrollable because of our subjection to change. If nothing else, we will subconsciously acquire ideas throughout the course of our lives even if we consciously attempt to repel them.

Fear leads to anger. We become angry as a defensive mechanism when a threat to our survival is perceived we respond with fear and then we respond in self-defence by either fleeing the perceived threat or becoming angry and attempting to fight the perceived threat. We become angry at the perceived cause of either the loss of our attachment or the acquisition of our aversion.

Anger leads to hatred. We move to hatred of the perceived cause of our loss or acquisition. We label this perceived cause as our enemy and wish for its destruction or non-existence in some way.

Hatred leads to suffering. Hatred of the perceived cause of our loss or acquisition causes us to suffer because the continued existence of that cause reminds us of our loss or acquisition. We come to believe we are better off without that perceived cause and think evil thoughts towards it. Our hatred thus colors our actions towards that cause and expands the suffering we experience to include that cause as we attempt to cause it to suffer.

For these reasons, to remove the attachment or aversion to a thing, person, or outcome is to remove the foundation of suffering. Without attachment or aversion, suffering cannot exist. If we do not wish to suffer, we must sever our attachments to objects, ideas, people, or outcomes. If we do not sever these attachments or aversions we must accept that we will suffer and accept the suffering which follows.

We know that we will experience the loss of contact with and experience of the material world upon the death and dissolution of the physical body. If we hold an attachment to material existence, then we will fear the loss of the experience of the material world. We will hate this loss and the perceived cause of it and we will suffer at the idea of this loss. Once it occurs, we will suffer as the mind turns in upon itself in hatred at its loss unable to interact with anyone else due to the loss of its connection to the material world. We suffer as we spiral into self-contained insanity until resurrection. And then once the material body is reconstituted and the psyche is made whole, we will stand in judgment. Not that we are judging but that we are being judged for every word and action. Suffering in our insanity we will be a threat to ourselves and to others and must be locked away to prevent harm to ourselves and to others.

If we do not hold an attachment to material existence, then we will not fear the loss of the physical body. We will not hate the perceived cause, and we will not suffer at the idea of it.

Human beings by nature, not by created nature but by the nature of our malfunction, are attached to their own existence as the center or basis of absolute existence. We experience the world around us as it relates to ourselves. We see the world around us first and foremost through our own eyes. We base our judgments of moral good or evil on what is acceptable to ourselves. The loss of the physical body is a perceived threat to this absolute existence.

Because of the malfunction, human beings cannot recognize or experience the presence of God or His love which surrounds everyone and everything. We cannot experience the world as it relates to Him or see it through His eyes. Instead of seeing the creation as just “good” as He does, we label things as “evil” and so ourselves bring evil into our experience of the world.

If we could experience the presence and love of God from the moment of our conception and personal awareness then we would not be attached to this material world because of our attachment to what is superior, that is God Himself. God is not subject to the movement of time. Time flows through Him, not He through time. Furthermore, God is omnipresent. All of creation exists as waves which move through His own existence as sound through air. There is nowhere in all of creation where God does not exist because all of creation requires God in order to exist and continue to exist. For this reason, God cannot be lost through the inevitable change of created existence We do not experience God in this way from conception because of the malfunction of the human psyche. It is not that God is not present, but that we are unable to recognize and experience Him because of the transference of the experience of the center of absolute existence from God to ourselves and cannot imagine existence apart from this “me” centered relationship to the material world.

In order to experience God and His love and to be attached to Him and detached from this material world, we must be reborn and made one with Him. In order to be reborn, one must first die. This is why Jesus Christ died, so that we might die with Him. This is why we are baptized into His death, that we are joined to His death. Those who have been joined to His death have therefore died. Those who have died have been therefore freed from the constraints of the malfunction unless they choose to place themselves back under those constraints through unnecessary attachments to the material world which lead to fear, which leads to anger, which leads to hatred, which leads to suffering.

We will suffer temporarily from the loss of material attachments now, or we will suffering eternally from the permanent loss of material attachments. It is our choice to what we will be attached, either to God, suffering the loss of material attachments now, or to objects, ideas, people, or outcomes and suffering eternally.

A Ramble About Transgender

I'm sitting here watching “Lady Valor” on CNN. It's about a Navy SEAL who is or has been going through trans-gender therapy. For those who, for one reason or another may not know, trans-gender therapy is the long process of transition from the gender you were born with to the opposite gender.

I remember from when I worked at a Walmart in Orange County seeing a person who was obviously going through this kind of therapy over the course of about a year or so. He started out by obviously looking and sounding like a man with thinning hair wearing women's clothes, and then over the process of time, little by little as I watched him come in every now and then, he would move closer and closer to looking and sounding like a woman. By the time I left Walmart, the last time I saw this person it was very obviously a “she”, and she, while not necessarily attractive, was absolutely happy with herself and comfortable with who she was. One could even say she was “radiant” in this way.

The Scriptures really are silent on this kind of transition. There are those who will probably argue with me on this, but between 1500 BC and 100 AD when they were written, this kind of transitional surgery was simply not possible. Furthermore, these are not men pretending to be women, wearing women's clothes and engaging in homosexual acts. These are men becoming women, accepting a female identity in nearly all aspects with the exception of the reproductive sense (for obvious reasons, and with future medical advances who knows?). The final result is not an effeminate man, but a (nearly) complete woman who accepts her identity as a woman. These are not merely men who have been castrated. Their entire sexual apparatus has been rearranged and turned inside out, and they are receiving regular injections of female hormones.

I honestly would not consider a transgendered person who completes the process of transformation to be a homosexual any more than they would consider themselves to be homosexual because they are in the process of becoming the opposite sex to which they are attracted. Once the process is complete and they are in fact female, it would be foolish to claim them to be attracted to the same sex.

Is it against nature? Yes. It is obviously in contradiction to the nature with which these men (or women) were born. But then what about those men or women who are born with their sexual organs wrong? Those women who are born with internal testicles instead of ovaries for example? We would think little of these women having those testicles removed and their removal is also against nature.

What should be the Christian's response to people who choose transgendered therapy? I don't think it should matter to be honest. We are commanded to love regardless of who the person is or what they have done. We are commanded to care. And if the person chooses to be a different gender and commits to it, who are we to argue? Especially if the person doesn't profess Christ; what difference does it make to us?

Is it right for those who profess Christ to seek this? No. But not for the reason you might think. When we profess Jesus Christ and receive baptism into His death we are professing that we have died to ourselves and our own wants and desires. We are told by His Apostles to be satisfied with where we are at. “Is anyone free? Do not seek to be a slave. Is anyone a slave? Do not seek to be free.” and “I have learned in whatever state I am to be content.” We are told to not seek more or less than what God gives us in each moment. And we are certainly told to not live for anything in or of this world, but to consider all that was advantage to us in this world to be crap in comparison to the superiority of knowing Christ Jesus. If a person is seeking to change their gender then they are still attached to the things of this world, being unsatisfied with what God has given or the state they are in. So no, seeking to change the gender with which you were born and in which you were baptized is not compatible with the Gospel teaching of Jesus Christ and His Apostles.

In the end, it is still up to the person and it is a permanent decision which they must live with. Once done, it cannot be undone. And as our Lord commanded, we must love and care for them regardless.

A Ramble About Race

Race is one of those subjects I very rarely talk or even think about. I think this is because I grew up in Orange County, California, probably one of the most inter-racial, multicultural, and pluralistic societies in the United States. At my high school alone there were sixty different languages spoken on a daily basis. There really isn't a majority ethnic group in Orange County, or in Southern California in general. There are folks of European descent, folks of Central and South American descent, folks of Asian and Middle Eastern descent, and there are folks of African descent and there is a pretty good melting pot of each to the point that my kids' public school class photographs from when they were little could easily resemble a class photograph from an international school overseas.

It's not that race doesn't come up, but for those of us who grew up with friends and classmates from dozens of different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, unless our parents made it a big deal for us, it just wasn't. It's the reason why, even though I can't read them, I know the difference between Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese writing at a glance whereas someone from my wife's hometown in Idaho might be hard pressed to identify which was which.

When I was growing up, I've always admired African Americans. I always saw African Americans as doctors, teachers, or lawyers, or just a people with a good, unique wisdom about them. Cosby was on TV, and the fact that he was a doctor and his wife was a lawyer wasn't unusual at all to my mind. Some of the men I looked up to as a kid were African American, one in particular who worked with my church's youth group when I was in grade school was one of the neatest guys I knew. I saw African American kids as gang members too, but in equal numbers with white kids, Hispanic kids, and Asian kids. It wasn't something which was relegated to one racial group or another, but a problem which plagued everyone (and still does).

So, the truth is when I see the kind of racial divide, or the bullying that happens against African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or any other particular ethnic grouping of Americans, I just don't get it. I don't get it when one group of human beings that descend from a certain ethno-type bully or belittle another group from a different ethno-type.

From a purely genetic standpoint, it has been proven that we all of us, every human being on the planet, descends from a single woman (Mitochondrial Eve), and at another point in history, a single man. Technically speaking, we are more than just the same species, we are all family. We are all the same ethno-type just removed from one another by thousands of years. And this is true whether you are a Christian or an Athiest; you are genetically related to the human being standing next to you no matter who it is. For example, I just found out that I have at least five percent Ashkenazi Jewish DNA through my mother. This isn't something I had known about or even imagined. It's not a lot, but technically this makes me a descendant of Abraham and genetically related to every Jewish and Arab person on the planet because without that one common ancestor, none of us, including me, would exist.

So, for me, the idea of discriminating against someone based on their “race” is laughably ridiculous. It's absurd to the point of idiocy. And yet here we are in the United States still having to deal with it. Whole groups of people treated as second class citizens because of the color of their skin and/or their ancestral ethnicity.

An unarmed African American kid is shot six times in the middle of the street by a white police officer while holding his hands high in the air. An unarmed African American young woman is shot to death on the front porch-step by the white man she was trying to ask for help. Not long ago an unarmed African American kid was walking home one night from a convenience store and he was shot to death by some white guy on neighborhood watch. The first African American President in the history of the United States, a decent, sincere, and moral man, is vilified and disrespected from day one like no other President in history by a mostly white opposition. And it goes on and on and on. African American parents have to tell their children the facts of this kind of life and talk with them about it like no white parent has ever had to talk with their kids. It's a talk I will never have to have with my kids. I will never have to tell my son that people will automatically assume he's up to no good because of the color of his skin. I will never have to tell my daughters that shopkeepers will automatically assume they're going to shoplift because of the color of their skin. My son will likely never have to worry about a Police officer shooting him for a minor offense because of the color of his skin.

What's ironic to me about this is that part of our ancestry is Cherokee through my paternal grandfather. In the 1800s, just that fact and the small amount of Cherokee that we are would have been enough excuse for the US government to force us to march with the rest of the Cherokee nation from Georgia to Oklahoma on foot, illegally confiscating what land and property we possessed and giving it to “white” citizens. A third of the Cherokee nation died on that forced march. If we hadn't the good fortune to be born when we were, we could have too. For a large part of the history of the United States, prejudice and discrimination against all Native Americans was so intense as to be genocidal (and yes, actual genocide was attempted by the US government at various times against different Native American tribes). It's a fact I never forget regardless of the color of my or my children's skins. And yet a further irony is that because my kids are so light skinned, we couldn't chance enrolling them in the public schools on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho because we were warned by the school itself that they would be routinely bullied and victimized by the Nez Perce kids because of the historic discrimination against Native Americans by a white US government, settlers, and miners.

It's a given that this kind of nonsense shouldn't happen, and yet it does and continues to do so. Especially in the Eastern US where there has been so much historic racism and conflict between those of European descent and those of African descent mostly due to the slave trade and the kidnapping and degradation of Africans for hundreds of years in North America. Some of our best and brightest scientists, thinkers, politicians, and great people have been of African descent, and yet they still have to warn their kids about how they're going to be singled out even if they're not doing anything wrong. Is it any wonder if they become angry and disillusioned?

I don't have a good spiritual lesson here. I'm not going to try and force one either. If someone's ethnic background still matters to a follower of Jesus Christ then something is wrong with that follower. Period. I really shouldn't even have to say that. No, I just wanted to point out the absurdity of it and hope someone listens.

A Ramble About Being a Good Person

A friend of mine on Facebook who happens to take a dimmer view of religion and religious people recently posted a photo which says “If you need the threat of eternal torture in order to be a good person, YOU'RE NOT A GOOD PERSON.”

I have to admit, my first reaction was defensive and I wanted to argue. But then I thought, “what exactly am I arguing against?” The Scriptures themselves essentially say this very thing, albeit in a different way and different context. Most church going Christians know Romans 3:23 and some may even know the larger context of Romans 3:10-23 (ESV):

“What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”

St. John writes in 1 John 1:6-8 (ESV):

“If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

St. Paul also writes in 1 Timothy 1:8-11 (ESV):

“Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted”

And finally in Romans 5:6-8 (ESV):

“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

The author of this quote is quite right. Good people don't need the threat of eternal torture in order to be good. Where the misconception come in though is that the orthodox Faith of Jesus Christ, regardless of denomination, doesn't say that good people do. It says that there is no one who is a good person. Where we get tripped up is that we want to think of ourselves as good people.

The human psyche itself can't handle the idea of being anything else but good and in the right. Any successful attempt at proving it wrong can possibly result in further insanity of one stripe or another in the strictest sense of the word as it struggles to cope with the apparently irreconcilable data. As a result it uses itself as the ultimate standard of what is good and evil, a malfunction inherited from the fall of humankind. My first impulse was to argue this quote by nature because my own psyche wanted to defend itself on instinct.

The truth of the Gospel directly contradicts the delusion which is inherent to the human psyche. The Gospel says that the human psyche, every human psyche, is malfunctioning and disordered. Left to its own devices it will continue in a state of malfunction until it eventually drives itself into total insanity.

When a human being's physical body dies, the psyche then continues on in God. But if the psyche is malfunctioning and cannot recognize God or His surrounding love, then it continues on in the torment of its own insanity. When someone is so far gone from reality and is a danger to himself or others in this world, we place them in institutions in special rooms where they can be looked after without causing harm to themselves or anyone else. So God does the same thing. This is not to say that such a life is comfortable for the person who has gone insane. The insanity of one's own mind is enough of a torment, so also the psyche that is trapped within itself unable to recognize God or His love. This is why God set up a treatment plan through Jesus Christ. The person in question just has to cooperate with it.

Ultimately, I decided to share that photo on Facebook with the headliner, “I totally agree.” Not necessarily for the same reasons as the person who created the photo, but still.