Why I Am Not Going to Church Right Now

      This may surprise some folks, but my family and I aren’t going to a church right now. In point of fact, I haven’t been inside a church in just about three years. The closest church to our farm, Cedar Grove Church (a Baptist/Evangelical community church), is about five miles down the road. We attended a few Sundays when we first moved to Kentucky, but dropped off after a while. The pastor was friendly, as were a few of the folks, but after a while it just became hard to take or feel a part of, especially after a very politically minded sermon by a guest speaker one Sunday. There was also a group of women that had taken my wife’s testimony poorly and began giving her the cold shoulder. In addition, there was a rumor spread around that we had later heard about that we were growing cannabis in the house because of some grow lights in the window my wife had been using to grow some potted herbs inside (for the record, we weren’t). After that, and with my own personal past experiences, attending a church and just being a part of a local congregation is a difficult and exhausting proposition.

      I’ve always had a complicated relationship with church. Not a complicated relationship with God, mind you, but a complicated relationship with church. As someone who has ASD, I have always been easily overwhelmed by people. Church is inherently a social experience, and for someone who simply can’t process all of that social information at once in real time, it can cause major sensory issues. I’ll admit, while my neurofeedback treatments did improve this for me immensely, too many people are still overwhelming and exhausting for me to navigate, especially when I don’t know them very well. This alone made the calling on my life to pastoral things even more of something that could only have been from God, and it is only when it is clearly the Spirit of Christ acting and speaking through me that it even goes well. You’d be surprised how many churches don’t want pastors who are honest about their neurodivergence.

     In some ways, paradoxically, it is this calling that also keeps me away for now. I’m going to be a bit more vulnerable here. It hurts to attend church for me right now, and it hurts in a way that I think very few people can understand. I first felt that I wanted to enter some kind of ministry as either a missionary or a pastor when I was sixteen and attending the church I more or less grew up in, Bethany Bible Fellowship, but I first really “felt” my place in ministry when I first gave the Eucharist as a Catholic to those in a nursing home in Three Hills as a eucharistic minister. I remember that first time clear as a bell, and even now it starts to make my eyes tear up in so remembering. I began leading the eucharistic liturgy (of course without the consecration as they were already consecrated and I was only a layperson) and something else, the Spirit, took over. I wish I could adequately describe to you that experience. It was the first time that I really felt like, “Yes, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” and then the, at the time, subversive feeling also came, “but I’m supposed to be saying the whole liturgy and consecrating it.” It was in that moment that my genuine role and calling was revealed to me, married though I was. I am drawn to serve sacramentally at the altar as both purpose and calling, and for various reasons at this point, I am not able to. This hurts, and is a wound that is more painful than I think most people would understand. It hurts to see others able to fulfill that role that I cannot. It hurts more to see them not understand the privilege that it really is, and especially when they’re abusing it or make it all about themselves when it is about stepping away from yourself and “channeling” Jesus Christ for others. I have had to walk out of a church service more than once to hide my near emotional breakdown over this.

      But what about just attending a Bible Study or church group? This is a difficult proposition at best. First, it is difficult because, again, it is a social gathering and I still don’t always do well in social gatherings. Second, such gatherings are nearly always along theological lines that I no longer adhere to or feel comfortable with. I really don’t want to get into pointless arguments in the middle of a group of people. That serves no purpose and is detrimental to encouraging either the discipleship of others or my own. The third reason may sound arrogant, and I hope it doesn’t once I explain. Over the years, I’ve accumulated something like 236 undergraduate credits, most of which are in Bible and Theology. In addition, I’ve got 23 Master’s level courses in theology under my belt. I’ve studied and used the Biblical languages for almost thirty-five years. I continue to study, delving into anything and everything relevant to these topics that I can, and have done so for decades, writing about it prolifically. Put simply, because of my education (formal and informal) I usually know more than the teacher or group leader, and because of this I can all too easily say too much and dominate the group, possibly making the teacher look bad or like he or she doesn’t know what they’re doing. If I’m not exceptionally careful, I can undermine the group leader or pastor all too easily without even intending to, and that is not acceptable. For this reason, I generally need to remain mostly silent, and most of the time the teacher or leader is either not saying anything new to me, or at times is saying something I know to be erroneous in some way and it would be rude of me and embarrassing for them to correct them. I know this because I’ve made those mistakes before. Without being able to contribute much, and being exhausted by all of the social information and interactions, such groups can become more of a torture for me, especially with a new group of people that don’t know me and whom I don’t know. People have no idea how much I want to say and explain and can’t because of this. It is painful to be in those situations, especially having to take the position of a learner when the teacher simply doesn’t know enough about what he’s teaching, and this has happened all too often. To use an analogy, how would a person who’s studied calculus feel if they were forced to sit in a remedial math class learning “2+2” over again, especially when the teacher ignorantly insists the answer is “5”? Is it possible for them to say something I don’t already know? Of course, but it has been rare for a long time.

     Finally, and more mundanely, I just don’t have the time. Church tends to occur during times of day when we’re out taking care of the animals in both the mornings and the evenings, and those chores tend to go for hours. There are no days off from them. Wednesday nights, when most church group meetings occur, we’re still doing chores and have to be up at 5am the next morning. Our only open time is in the middle of the day.

      Maybe one day we’ll either find a church or I’ll start one where these things won’t be obstacles, but for now, they are. And so I attempt to teach, encourage, and “pastor” from my computer keyboard anyone whose path I run across. I write and share those things God puts on my heart, whether folks like what I have to say or not. And I attempt to put into practice everything I write about and preach from my keyboard, being the disciple of Jesus Christ I urge everyone else to be. Failing, correcting, and going again.

Of Diseased Trees and Good Fruit

      A few years ago, and not long after Heidi and I arrived in Kentucky, we found ourselves at a Rural King in Owensboro looking for fruit trees to plant on the property. After going through and looking at everything they had left that season, we settled on two nectarine trees and a couple of apple trees. (I think we’ve got a peach or apricot tree as well, but I’m not certain what it is at this point.) The trees we chose were the healthiest looking that we could find. We brought them home and put them into the ground with as much care as we could, making sure to give each one a good dose of rabbit poop mixed into its soil. (For those who don’t know, rabbit poop is sometimes referred to as “brown gold” where plants are concerned. It’s kind of like nature’s Miracle Grow.) We’ve protected them, watered them, and taken the best care of them that we could.

     As it turned out, however, we didn’t know that the trees were diseased when we bought them. We knew that others in their stock were and actively avoided them, but these looked healthy at the time. Over the last couple of years as the trees grew, the disease began to manifest. In particular, it became very apparent in the fruit of the trees. I remember last year, especially with the nectarine trees, we went to almost absurd lengths to protect the blossoms from the late freezes in March so that we could have fruit from them. The blossoms did develop into fruit, but the fruit was all diseased, became blackened and shriveled, and couldn’t be eaten.

     Jesus said that “A good tree can’t produce diseased fruit, and a diseased tree can’t produce good fruit.” That very saying has played itself out in front of our eyes with the fruit trees we bought and planted. Like I said, they looked healthy when we bought them, they even looked healthy with bright green foliage within the first year or so, but the disease made itself known not long after no matter what we did and the fruit bore this out.

     Bu Jesus wasn’t just talking about trees. He was talking about people, doctrines, and ideologies. In particular at the moment, He was talking about Pharisees and Sadducees that looked spiritually healthy on the outside, but whose fruit was born of the flesh and diseased. He was talking about people who rigidly followed the rules regarding tithing and diet, but ignored or contradicted the foundational commands regarding love, mercy, and compassion. And He was talking about the beliefs and ideologies that sanctioned that ignoring and contradiction. Diseased trees can’t produce good fruit because the disease runs throughout the tree, regardless of how healthy it might appear on the outside.

     This is just as true today of religions, churches, denominations, pastors, priests, and anyone who claims to be religious or spiritual. If such a tree is healthy, it will produce good fruit. The kind of fruit which should be seen is the person and personality of Jesus Christ Himself. If the person, belief system, or organization is healthy, we should be seeing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, trust, courtesy, self-control and all such things which reflect the person of Jesus Christ, the Divine Logos, flowing and growing through them. If such a tree is diseased, we will see diseased fruit. We will see pride, ego, fear, anger, sexual infidelity, overconsumption, mercilessness, arguments, and factionalism. We will see abuse; emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and abuse of power. We will see avarice. We will see theft. We will see people ruined, hurt, and destroyed. In the shadows, we will see murders. We will see atrocities. Diseased trees cannot produce good, healthy fruit no matter how much you want them to.

     One’s fruit will betray the state of their spiritual, emotional, and psychological health, no matter how good they look on the outside. If that fruit isn’t the Logos, if it isn’t love, joy, peace, patience and all of the fruit of the Spirit, if it isn’t compassion and loving kindness, then it is diseased and shouldn’t be eaten lest it make the eater themselves sick.

Understanding Why I Wrote the Hero Committing an Atrocity in My Story.

      I have often said that my stories tend to write themselves after a couple of chapters, and it’s true. Once I establish and flesh out the characters, the world, and the situation and circumstances, they always tend to take on a life of their own. Nowhere is that more true than with the crossover fan fiction novel I wrote called “Chronicles of Narnia: The Western Darkness” combining the worlds of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” (with additional material from their respective spin-off games and movie adaptations) and in particular, the eighth chapter of that book. This has always been the most controversial and difficult chapter I've ever written. I didn't like it or understand it myself and considered removing it or changing it somehow except that it's necessary to move the story along and adds another look at the horrors of this kind of war. I would go to work on altering it and then be unable to actually do anything with it, and give up. Something was keeping me from changing it.

     In my Narnia/LOTR fanfic, jusr before the four kings and queens of Narnia return home to England at the end of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Orcs discover Narnia a few days east of Mordor and begin a kind of invasion to strip it of resouces. The Narnians respond by declaring war after talking animals and dryads are slaughtered. I wrote that Aslan, in a private conversation with High King Peter, ordered the slaughter of every orc the Narnian army came across in a similar vein to the Israelites slaughtering the Canaanites. As the Orcs would show no mercy, as an irredeemable race (in keeping with Tolkien’s views) neither were the Narnians to show any to the Orcs. After learning this lesson the hard way upon their first true battle, the Narnians comply as they march into Mordor from the east. This goes relatively smoothly, if distastefully, until chapter eight.

     In chapter 8 is where this policy of orc genocide results in an atrocity no one expected. The army comes across human women held as sex slaves for Sauron’s Orcs, and among them are half-orc infants. Not wanting to disobey Aslan’s orders, “every Orc,” Peter gives the order to slay them. The Narnians all balk at the very thought, all except the Minotaurs who carry out his orders of infanticide to the letter. No one is unaffected. Everyone hates what happened, and it leaves Peter to wallow in Dwarven ale trying to dull the pain, while others weep openly.

     I hated that chapter when I wrote it. Some of my readers were horrified by it too, wondering if Aslan himself was an evil character in my story. It’s haunted me since that point now for several years, and I never understood why I wrote it in the first place. I could have left the brothels out, but that would have been unrealistic, and even Tolkien wrote about half-orcs in his novel. They had to come from somewhere, and I just can’t see a human woman willingly give herself to an orc. It would have been unrealistic that they wouldn’t have run into it. But I hated it, and didn’t understand it. Not until the other day when it hit me.

     I realized something important about that chapter; a detail that everyone, including me, had overlooked. Aslan never said a word about the half-orc children. He never said anything about half-orcs at all. Peter assumed that his instructions extended to them. That was Peter's interpretation of his orders. 

      And then I realized, that was the point. 

     It had nothing to do with Aslan's orders, and everything to do with how Peter understood them in a situation that wasn't specified. He made what he considered the "right" decision in order to obey, even though it was really an atrocity as both his gut and his heart were screaming at him. Peter was a good and noble man who wouldn’t have even thought of this kind of action under any other circumstances. But because he had been told “every orc,” he assumed that meant “everyone with orc blood,” and had everyone with orc blood put to the sword. No exceptions.

    There is another character from Fallout 4 called “Paladin Danse” who is like this. Paladin Danse is a good, honorable, and noble man who firmly believes in the ideals and values of the Brotherhood of Steel whose objective is to keep dangerous technology out of dangerous hands. But Danse believes in the BoS and their code so strongly, that he has absolutely no trouble with slaughtering “synths,” that is, synthetic humans or androids (in addition to mutated humans whether they’re hostile or not). When it is discovered that he himself is a synth, he not only willingly submits to execution, but if you fail to persuade him otherwise and refuse to do it yourself, he will take his own life.

     Sometimes, in seeking to do the right thing, we can commit horrendous harm. As flawed, malfunctioning human beings, we can identify with and adhere to a belief system (or their interpretation of that belief system) so rigidly that an otherwise good man or woman can commit the most heinous of acts and not even be aware that they’re doing the wrong thing. They may sincerely believe that “it’s for the greater good” even as their victim is pleading with them to stop, or screaming and in tears. We’re just trying to live by the code or morality we believe in or identify with. We’re just trying to do what we think we’re supposed to be doing even if our empathy and compassion is screaming at us that we’re causing atrocious harm and evil.

      Peter paid for his orders with nightmares and PTSD in my story. Depending on which decisions you make in the game, Danse pays for his rigid adherence to what he believes is right with his life. In real life, a person may pay for not listening to their compassion and empathy with guilt that can never be satiated in addition to other consequences.

     Compassion, empathy, and love are the only standards by which an action may be guaranteed to not cause harm. Loving kindness and compassion are never the wrong choice, and are not governed by any moral code or ideology, but by feeling what the other person is feeling, and seeing yourself in that person.

On What Is And What Is Not Up To You

     One of the most basic principles of Stoicism is to let go of everything which is not up to you. To let go of everything outside of your control, and cease to fret about it because there's nothing you can do to change it. What does this include? Almost everything, really. What happens external to yourself in life is not up to you, and whatever originates outside of yourself is outside of your control. The weather? Not up to you. What your friends, family, or enemies do? Not up to you. What happens with your possessions? Not really up to you in the long run. Whether you live, fall ill, or die? Not actually up to you. Whether catastrophe strikes? Not up to you. According to Stoicism, the only thing which has been given to you which is up to you and within your control is how you respond to these things, the actions you decide to take, and the things you decide to say.

      Stemming from this also is another basic principle, that you are a slave of whatever can compel you to act, whether it be an employer, a possession, a friend, a romantic interest, or an idea. If you hold an attachment to someone or something where you fear the consequence of not doing what they want or not protecting it, then you are that person's or that thing's slave.

     Both Jesus and Paul said much the same thing in different ways. Jesus was explicit that no one could have two masters, and that in order to be His disciple, one had to drop or let go of just about everything that person was more attached to than to Him. Paul himself wrote that "you are a slave to whatever you obey, whether to hamartia leading to death, or to God leading to a right state of being."

     What are you trying to control that's not up to you? This is going to be the source of your suffering and frustration. Who or what can compel you to do their bidding? You are a slave to that person or thing. Look deeply at yourself and your life, and be mindful of both of these things. We cannot control who or what makes demands on us, but we can control how we respond to them. There is always a choice. Consequences will come with that choice, and we do not always have control over those consequences, but there is always a choice nonetheless.

The Evolution of My Understanding of Salvation - Addendum, No One Comes to the Father Except Through Me

       One of the most well known and often repeated verses in the Gospels is John 14:6 which is traditionally translated, "Jesus says to him, 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.'" More often than not, this verse is used to declare that only those who believe in Jesus Christ (and usually in a specific way) will achieve salvation, whether they have heard of Jesus Christ or not. This verse is used to exclude the majority of humanity, and include only a very small group of people who profess a certain set of doctrines about Jesus Christ. Up until relatively recently, I myself struggled with understanding this verse any other way as well.

     The key though to understanding what Jesus was saying here and elsewhere in the Gospel of John is that John starts his Gospel with calling Jesus Christ the Logos incarnate. The Logos in the ancient Roman world was similar in concept to the Tao or even the Hindu Om. It was divine in nature with a relationship to the God, as the ancient Greeks and Romans used the term, which at times seemed distinct and at times overlapped. A standard definition might be the "divine principle which was used to create everything, and which also resides in every human being in some form." The Logos, identified with the God, is the active governing principle of the universe which the God used to create the universe and in which the entire universe consists and is held together, and which every human being holds a share or part. In the first century, the Logos was both the conscious rational mind of the individual, and the conscious rational mind which governed the cosmos, operating in both. Every human soul contained a shred, piece, or fractal of the Logos, and the Logos was the governing Head over them all. John's understanding of Jesus as the Logos Himself is crucial to understanding Jesus' statements about Himself.

     When Jesus speaks of the God as His Father in the Gospel of John, He is speaking as the Logos. It is the Logos which does whatever it sees the God and Father doing. When He says, "Before Abraham came to be, I Am," it is the Logos which is speaking, and not His humanity. When He says, "I and the Father are one," it is the Logos which is one with the Father. And so, when Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," He was speaking as the Logos. It is no accident that it is John who records Him saying it, and it is John who begins his Gospel by calling Jesus Christ the Logos incarnate. This is an important distinction, because it is the Logos which is the way, the truth, and the life. When He said, "No one comes to the Father except through Me," He was saying that there is no way to experience that unity with God/Source, no way for the human soul to communicate with its Source except through the Logos of which it is a part or member. What He is not talking about here is that no one can come to the Father if they don't believe He died to pay for their sins. What He is not talking about here is that no one can come to the Father if they don't accept the Nicene Creed. What He is not talking about is acceptance of the canon of Biblical Scripture, six day creationism, or any other specific doctrine or teaching. He is talking about being the Logos Himself, firstborn from the God through which and by which everything was created, and of which every human soul holds a part.

      Why is this such an important distinction? Because there are many who appear to have found ways to suppress or disengage from their malfunctioning amygdala and survival responses apart from any Christian faith, or even knowledge of Jesus Christ Himself. There are many Buddhist monks who appear to "operate with the Spirit" producing the "fruit of the Spirit" of love, joy, peace, patience, trust, and so on without adhering to even the basics of strictly Christian belief. As I wrote about previously, those who have had Near Death Experiences suddenly appear to be able to stay in communication with the Logos part of themselves and demonstrate all of these things. None of them may use this language to describe it, but this appears to be what is happening. And so just as Jesus told those Judeans listening that He had sheep who were not a part of that fold, so also these people among others appear to have stumbled into an understanding of engaging with the Logos and disengaging from their egos produced by the malfunctioning flesh regardless of whether they profess to be Christian or not. The mechanics remain the mechanics regardless of what a person might believe about them, or what theological beliefs they might have. As long as the amygdala and survival responses are neutralized in some way, communication with the Head can begin to flow again.

The Evolution of My Teaching on the Neurological Basis of Hamartia - Addendum, Spiritual and Mystical Traditions

      In my previous posts that were a part of the series, "The Evolution of My Teaching on the Neurological Basis of Hamartia," I established that Hamartia, "error, mistake, flaw, or malfunction" in Greek, as Paul described it in the New Testament is both biological and hereditary, that, as biological, because it deals with behavior it is neurological in nature, and that the best and most likely candidate for this distinctly human neurological error is an abnormally formed amygdala as compared with the amygdalas of other primates. I discussed how human morality developed this condition, how the ego or self-identity emerged from this condition, how the death of all current human beings might result from this condition, and the dysregulation of which potential gene might be at least partly at fault for this condition in pre-natal development of the human brain. In a following post, "The Evolution of My Understanding of Salvation," I discussed how the implications of this concept impacted the interpretation of Biblical texts regarding the idea of salvation through Jesus Christ and his death, burial, and resurrection, and how those events produced a method of neutralizing this malfunctioning human amygdala for those who might choose it.

     In this post, I want to explore, as a kind of addendum to these previous posts, how the mystical and spiritual religious traditions also seem to affirm or confirm that it is the amygdala, or the limbic system of the brain in general, which is at fault in the obstruction of "spiritual" communication between the human soul and its Source or "Head" as has been previously described. 

     In most spiritual or mystical traditions, things like overeating and most sexual activity with very few exceptions are either highly regulated or prohibited altogether. Where sexual activity in particular is concerned, most of these traditions (with the exception of certain Hindu practices) will prohibit it outright for their monastics and religious orders, while those that permit it do so only under very strict guidelines, and generally only within the boundaries of a legally recognized marital or at least committed, stable relationship, and frequently with a distinct intention for procreation. Sexual activity for recreational purposes, and in particular sexual activity with multiple partners is strictly discouraged and prohibited. In the same way, though perhaps with less severity, overconsumption and overeating is discouraged and frequently prohibited as well. Who hasn't heard of the "sin of gluttony?" These things are of course in addition to the letting go of one's attachment to possessions, personal relationships, attitudes, ideas, and anything else which one might identify with to the point that fear or anger would be triggered if these things are seen as under threat. While I am thinking in particular of those proscriptions and conditions laid down in the New Testament and Christian religious orders, they are also encountered in the religious and monastic orders of other belief systems as well. The vows of "poverty, chastity, and obedience," or at least the idea of them, are not unique to Christian monastic tradition even though they may be couched in different language.

     The goal of nearly every mystical or spiritual tradition is the experience of one's unity with the Divine. This is true whether one is discussing enlightenment and Nirvana (or cessation) with the Buddhist, or whether one is talking to a Hindu, a New Ager, a Shaman, or Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic monks and mystics. This experience is also reported by fairly ordinary, often non-spiritual or non-religious people who have Near Death Experiences as well. Crucially, in this last point regarding people with no mystical or spiritual practice training, those who experience NDEs have little to no brain activity when they do experience them which means the amygdala in these cases has been neutralized for the duration of their NDE.

     What is important here though is the observation that all of these mystical and spiritual traditions independently developed nearly identical regulations and prohibitions for their practitioners to follow to foster their experience of this oneness with the Divine. With little contact with one another, and frequently very different, competing theologies, mythologies, and dogmas, they all came to the same conclusion that these things needed to be adhered to if one was going to make progress in their goal. What is also important is that all of these prohibitions and regulations directly relate to the survival responses which are regulated by the human amygdala and governed by the human hypothalamus: fight/flight/feeding/sex.

     Consider this observation that, the reason why things like most sexual activity and overeating are routinely regulated and prohibited among nearly every spiritual or mystical tradition (with a few notable exceptions) is because these things, in addition to fear and anger responses to threats, are also governed by the limbic system, the hypothalamus in particular, and thus they activate the abnormal human amygdala. Nearly every spiritual or mystical tradition, whether they realize it or not, operates on the unspoken assumption that anything which activates the amygdala's fight/flight/feeding/sex response will obstruct or block communication with the Head/Logos/God/Source and thus will obstruct the experience of one's union with Him. This is the reason why sex in particular is so tightly regulated among the traditions, whether they know it or not, because that reproductive drive is so powerful, especially among men. It is also the reason why "gluttony" is discouraged and fasting is encouraged. The true objective is to keep from engaging the survival responses in order to not obstruct or break one's continuous communication with the God with whom they are one.

     This might also extend to the overconsumption of alcohol and other intoxicants because they affect the brain and can directly or indirectly activate the amygdala's survival response system. Intoxicants obstruct this communication as well in various ways depending on which parts of the brain they target. Another point which should be noted is that this might also explain the dim view of homosexuality which is recorded in both the Christian Scriptures as well as the Scriptures of other belief systems and traditions. Like with the solicitation of prostitutes, adultery, incest, pederasty, and simple sexual activity outside of a legal marital relationship, it was seen as giving in to one's "animal passions," that is, submitting to or succumbing to the sex response demanded by the abnormal human amygdala which, as discussed, would of course obstruct one's soul's communication with God/Source because it would still be the amygdala which would be engaged rather than neutralized. Marital, heterosexual relationships were seen as approved because it was considered the couple's family duty to produce offspring which couldn't be done without having sex between an unrelated male and a female, regardless of one's sexual preferences. Whether one can pursue the continued and open communication of the human soul with its Source while engaged in a committed, monogamous homosexual relationship may simply depend on the individual in question in the same way having many possessions may or may not obstruct this communication depends on whether the fear or aggression response is triggered by them. In this, I am reminded of St. Augustine who recognized that he had to give up sleeping with his mistress, and sexual activity as a whole including the prospect of a marriage, in order to pursue a spiritual life. Paul himself raised his concerns about any marital relationship and being a disciple of Jesus Christ because those who were married had to be concerned with the needs and desires of their spouses, whereas those who weren't could be concerned with what pleased the Lord alone. But he also recognized that not everyone could maintain that kind of control over their sexual drive and responses. It was more compassionate and pragmatic to encourage a marital relationship for this latter group while encouraging an abandonment of sexuality altogether for those who could handle it. But the rule, whether the reason was understood or not, can be traced back universally to avoiding what may trigger one's fight/flight/feeding/sex responses, and it was recognized by the Apostle that this was different for different people and had to be handled as such.

     All of the prohibitions and proscriptions in the New Testament in particular, and in mystical and spiritual traditions in general, can all be explained by this abnormal, malfunctioning human amygdala which I have described. They all aim to curb and minimize triggering the survival responses of fight/flight/feeding/sex which obstructs the communication of one's soul to its Source which is the God who is love.

Your Professed Beliefs are Worthless Without Love, Because God is Love

      I started translating 1 Corinthians 13 again this morning. It just happens to come next in my on and off morning translation through 1 Corinthians. In a way, it feels kind of redundant because I just did this recently when I do a new edition of "The Path," but here it is again, and I can't help but think it's both one of the most quoted passages in the Scriptures, and one of the most ignored for that, especially the first three verses.

     In the first three verses Paul explicitly says that a person could speak every language, even angelic ones, know everything, see and understand every mystery, have the kind of faith or trust to relocate mountains, give everything they own away and even hand over their own body to be burned, but for all of this he says that if they do not possess love, they have nothing, are nothing, and it helps them nothing at all. Not one thing. According to Paul, it doesn't matter what you say, what you do, or what you know, if you do not possess love, it's all worthless and for nothing, and so are you. 

     There really can be no overstating the profound implications of Paul's statements in these three verses because they coincide with John's explicit statement in his first letter, "The person not loving doesn't know God, because God is love." Why is it all worthless and for nothing without love? Because whatever else it may be, it is worthless without the God who is love. It is good for nothing to anyone if it isn't born from God who is love. This is why the two most important commands in the Gospels are to love God with everything you've got and to love your neighbor as yourself. Add to these His instructions to love your enemies, and just to love one another as He loved us. If it isn't born from love, it isn't born from God, and if it isn't born from God than the action, word, or thought is worth nothing. As John also wrote, the person who makes their home in love, makes their home in God, and God within them.

      What is the mark, the indicator that someone is genuinely operating from God, or the Spirit of God? Love. What is the sign that their religion or beliefs or practices are valid? Love. What is it that God wants most of all from us? Love, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, non-judgment, and these are the things which Jesus Himself explicitly taught. The person who doesn't display love isn't a disciple of Jesus Christ, no matter what they say.

     The foundational nature of Love in one's faith and practice cannot be overstated because if it isn't present, if it can't be seen in that person, then nothing they say or do is originating from God and they should be at best ignored and guided back to it, and at worst actively opposed for the deceiver and liar that they are.

     Virtually everything else can be tossed to the wayside in terms of belief structures as far as God is concerned, but this one point is absolutely mandatory, that what we do, what we say, and who we are is born from love and possesses love, because if it doesn't, then we don't know Him.

The Evolution of My Understanding of Salvation - Part 1(?)

 

I’ve been struggling to write this for days. I sit down to write, and I stare at the blank page just as blank myself. Something subconscious within me has been actively avoiding it, and immediately trying to find other things to do. I even changed the operating system on my laptop just to buy myself more time instead of sitting down and working this out.

What is it that I’ve been actively avoiding? Recently, I attempted to explain where my hypothesis on Hamartia as neurological in nature came from, and how it evolded, but that is not the end of the story. I didn’t feel like I could just leave it at our common human problem. I wanted to do the same thing for the solution to the problem. How did I arrive at the conclusions I did, and why? This isn’t a light subject to take on, and my conclusions about the solution, like my conclusions about the problem, tend to stand outside of the theological structures in which I grew up and in which I was at least initially trained.

The way I was initially raised and trained could best be explained by a short Gospel presentation meant for quick or cold-contact evangelism called the “Three Crucial Issues.” It’s been years, but if I remember right, these issues were 1) All are guilty of sin and deserve God’s judgment, 2) Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins, and 3) All one must do is believe that Jesus paid for their sins and they would be saved, that is, forgiven of all their sins and wrongdoing and granted entry into heaven when they died. The way I was taught, once a person did actually believe this, then nothing they did from then on could take this free forgiveness and entry into heaven away from them. It was also taught that the only people who would be forgiven and granted entry into heaven were those who believed this. All others, whether they had access to this knowledge would suffer God’s condemnation and be thrown into hell when they died. Writing it out again now as I am, there is a certain simplicity to this explanation which is of course appealing. And the way I was initially taught to read the Scriptures, the 66 books of the Protestant Bible, only reinforced this understanding, that is, as long as I used the right English translation (preferably the King James Version, but the New King James and the New American Standard were considered acceptable). People from other denominations weren’t actually Christians as I was taught, because they didn’t believe the way we did, and they too needed to “be saved.”

Looking at it written out now, there were so many things I took for granted, chief of which was that I knew what “sin” was. I trusted what my pastors and teachers taught me about it. I trusted that the books I read about these things and other points of Christian teaching, all of which were squarely within the realm of Evangelical Protestantism, knew what they were talking about. Even after I was ostracised from the group I had studied with and been a part of, I held rigidly firm to all things which I had been taught, not so secretly hoping that my “time of exile” would come to an end, and I would be able to return to what had been a kind of found family for me. That no matter how hard I tried I could not became more of a gift of God than I undestood at the time, because, freed from needing to stay aligned with the right belief system in order to remain “in the fold,” for the first time in my life I gave myself permission to question and find answers for myself.

I became Roman Catholic, and in the process of so doing, I began actually reading both the Early Church Fathers and the actual official Catechism of the Catholic Church. The former revealed to me that the beliefs of the earliest Christians had almost nothing in common with the way I had been taught. The latter taught me that the Roman Catholic Church which had been demonized in my Bible School coursework was not the Roman Catholic Church as it officially taught, and that there was more agreement than disagreement between the two. The priest who confirmed me was one of the most Christ-like men I had met, and the Franciscan Sister was also one of the most loving and kind women I have ever met. I remember distinctly thinking to myself, if what I was taught about the Roman Catholic Church was wrong, then what else was I taught that was also mistaken? I then branched out and began reading the spiritual works of other faiths as well as Greek philosophy. And in all of it, it drew me, not away from Jesus Christ, but always back to Him, whether it was Plato’s Socratic dialogues, the Gospel of Buddha, the Tao Te Ching, or even the Bhagavad Gita. I would eventually join the Old Catholic Church. I entered the priesthood there on April 2^nd, 2005, and was introduced not just to Roman Catholic theological teaching, but Eastern Orthodox as well. I would dive into the wealth of the Philokalia and the writings of the Eastern Monastic Fathers in addition to more modern Orthodox writings, both theological and mystical, and my understanding of the writings of the Ancient Christian Church prior to the schism between the east and the west grew by leaps and bounds. I would also dive more and more into the original Greek text of the New Testament, relying on it more and more until I just stopped using English translations altogether except for a quick reference when needed. I became so much better acquainted with John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jesus Christ Himself in those pages, reading, translating, re-reading, and re-translating over and over and over again so many times with each book that I lost count.

And then, along the way, I took a job working with students with moderate to severe developmental and medical disabilities, among them Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down’s Syndrome, Angelman’s Syndrome, quadriplegic students, and more. It was in this position where I first asked the question, “What if Paul meant what he said when he said that Hamartia was located ‘in the flesh’?” and I started taking psychology courses to find out. My answer to that question is in the five posts preceding this one.

But my answer to that question, that Hamartia, the “sin nature,” is really an abnormally formed amygdala peculiar to human beings, raised several more questions. I began to see it as a disorder similar to the developmental disorders of the students I worked with every day. Their brains hadn’t developed normally, and their behaviors reflected that. Of course they still had choices they could make, but those choices would be heavily influenced by their abnormal neurological development. We had to gently correct harmful behaviors, but what we were really taking note of and keeping track of was whatever progress they were making, no matter how small. We expected the aberrant behaviors because of the disorders, but what we kept track of and celebrated were the behaviors which average human beings would just consider normal and appropriate. The same is true of any good parent with a child with a developmental or psychological disorder. You don’t keep track of the wrong behavior, you expect that and correct it when it’s happening, but you forget all about it when they do something “normal and appropriate.” You flat out celebrate that, encourage that, nearly dance for joy over that.

And similar to Jesus’s question, I had to ask, if we as human beings, being as twisted as we can be sometimes, know to do this with our own children, why wouldn’t God do so as well with us? Why would He demand repayment for each and every one of our disorder influenced harmful behaviors, much less a blood sacrifice? Why would His focus be on what we do wrong instead of what we do right? While this question may have been subversively beginning to form in my subconscious, it was a series of different podcasts by different people who had deconstructed that really brought it into focus when they asked, “What kind of a God who is love or Father would demand the murder of His own Son in order to forgive people?” While I had heard the criticism before of course, and brushed it off, now it hit me squarely between the eyes. It was the kind of thing one of the pagan tribal gods from mythology might demand, but not the God which was described in the pages of the New Testament, or even for that matter, the God who was described in the prophets of the Old Testament.

I then really began to look at this question, and go back to all of those Scriptures which I had been taught to gloss over and interpret in the light of the “Penal Substitutionary Atonement” (PSA) which had formed the basis of my understanding of why Jesus died on the cross. The more I looked, the more I came to understand that not only was PSA only one way it could be interpreted among many, but it wasn’t even the way the people to whom the Scriptures were originally written would have understood it. I came to understand that the roots and origins of PSA and the three crucial issues that I was taught were really born in the 16^th century, and not the first century. And the deeper I studied the Greek language, and the Greek texts of the Scriptures, the more I came to understand that the English translations I had initially been taught to use were skewed, intentionally or unintentionally, to teach PSA when the Greek really didn’t, and it was never really the intention of any of the authors of the New Testament, much less the Old. But then this leads to the question, “What does it then mean that ‘Christ died for our sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:3) as the Scriptures teach?”

Let me plagiarize myself a little here:

“The practice of animal sacrifice is an ancient one. From what I’ve been able to read on the subject, there have been animal sacrifices from the very beginnings of human civilization, and from even before this. When the first sacrifices are mentioned in the Book of Genesis in the Scriptures, the practice was already well established. What’s important to note here is that, prior to the Book of Exodus, God never asks for or requires a sacrificial offering. Many Bible Evangelicals will point to Genesis 3:21 as proof of God establishing the need for a blood sacrifice to forgive sins. But the text itself says nothing of the kind. It just says, literally, that God made tunics from leather for Adam and Eve to replace the leaf coverings they had sewn together. It never says God killed the animals to get the leather. It never says this needed to be done for Him to forgive them. The only thing the text really suggests is that God taught them the rudiments of leather working out of compassion for their new reality, and the delusion that their natural nakedness needed to be covered up. Leather happens to be a far more durable clothing material than leaves held together with grass or stalks. Another passage held up is Abel’s offering from his flock being accepted and Cain’s offering of vegetables he farmed being rejected in Genesis 4. While it is one potential interpretation to suggest that this supports God having established blood sacrifices, it is not the only interpretation. It can just as well be said this passage might be an amalgam or a metaphor for our malfunctioning human ancestors who embraced tilling the soil and farming, the rudiments of civilization, driving those other human species which existed once upon a time, all hunter gatherers, to extinction. It really all depends on how it is seen.

With this in mind, the first actual mentions of animal sacrifice in the Scriptures assume it as a well established practice with meaning, and one which God did not explicitly ask for. In every instance, the initiative is taken by human beings to build an altar and offer a sacrifice in order to honor Him in some way. The one exception here is actually Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, a human sacrifice no less (also practiced from extremely ancient times), which the text makes clear that God had no intentions of Abraham going through with it. This understanding of blood sacrifice as an established practice continues into the Mosaic law. If you notice in the text of the law, in a similar way that it treats things like slavery and polygamy, the Mosaic law doesn’t found or establish the practice of sacrifice in order to forgive sins, but it regulates it, establishing rules, rituals, and specific ways it had to be done from the building of an altar out in the bush to what the official place of sacrifice was to look like to the priesthood in charge of that sacrifice.

So, what am I driving at here? That animal sacrifice, much less human sacrifice, in order to forgive sins wasn’t God’s idea in the first place. It was an idea born out of our malfunctioning mind, that we could somehow transfer our guilt onto an innocent animal or person and then destroy it by destroying that creature, and had become integrated very early in human culture and society.

So what does God have to say about sacrifices? In the passage I translated at the beginning of this, Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 which says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and a knowledge of God more than whole burnt offerings.” In Psalms 40:6-8 the psalmist writes, “Sacrifice and offering you didn’t desire, but ears you prepared for me; You didn’t require whole burnt offering and sin offering. Then I said, ‘Look, I am here! It is written about me in the head of the book. I delight to do your will, my God. Your law is within my heart.” In Psalm 50:7-23, God is explicit that sacrifices of animals don’t impress Him and that He could do without them. Instead, the worship He wants is gratitude and people doing what they promised. He really takes issue with folks quoting His laws and covenant and then hurting and harming others. In Psalm 51:14-17 David writes, in his great penitential psalm, addressing God says that “You don’t delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give one; burnt offerings don’t please You.” He continues by saying, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” This last part is significant because God very clearly talks about despising the animal sacrifices brought to Him by the people of Judah in Isaiah 1:11-20, animal sacrifices and rituals regulated by the very same Mosaic law which He instructed Moses to write. God tells them to stop bringing them altogether because He’s sick of them. He then tells them what He wants instead, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the ruthless, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Notice He says to stop bringing the sacrifices, but then says “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean.” How were they supposed to do that without animal sacrifices if animal sacrifices were absolutely necessary for forgiveness and absolution? In Jeremiah 7:21-26 God tells the people that He didn’t even command Israel regarding sacrifices or whole burnt offerings when He brought them out of Egypt. Instead, He commanded them that if they obeyed what He said, then He would be their God, and they would be His people. So there is an implication that even the sacrifices spoken of in the Torah were someone else’s idea, and not God’s. 1 Samuel 15:22-23 also sums up which God prefers when the prophet tells Saul that God prefers people listening to Him to offering animal sacrifices. Finally, there is also Ezekiel 18 where the entire point of the chapter is that if someone who has done a life of wrongdoing turns from that wrongdoing to do what is right, God would forgive him and he would live. Nowhere in this chapter are sacrifices mentioned as being necessary for God to forgive that person.

The thrust of the New Testament arguments are that animal sacrifices, the blood of bulls and goats and sheep, could do nothing about our inherited malfunction. The best they could do was make us feel less guilty from a psychological perspective because something had been tangibly done to make up for it. In reality however, God never needed them to forgive us. He just needed us to realize our screw ups, turn around, and seek Him.”

If Christ died for our sins, as the Scriptures say, then it wasn’t in order to forgive them. But if it wasn’t in order to forgive them, then what was it for? When we talk about the New Testament, Christian concept of salvation, we’re talking about the New Covenant which was prophesied by Jeremiah. It is called the New Covenant to distinguish it from the covenant or contract God made with Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai, and Jesus Himself uses these words (Byzantine and Textus Receptus texts) when initiating what is called “The Lord’s Supper” as well as “Mass,” and He linked it directly with His own body and blood. In the initial prophetic text, the New Covenant was to be made with “the house of Israel,” but in the New Testament, it is made with the entire world and is considered to apply to the entire world.

The terms of the New Covenant as recorded in Jeremiah 31:33-34 are these, “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it on their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (KJV) What I saw this time, after reading it dozens of times and even memorizing this passage, was where God Himself actually put the emphasis. Sure, forgiveness was a part of it at the end, but the first thing, the substantial meat of the New Covenant was that he would put His law “in their inward parts, and write it on their hearts.”

In other words, the new covenant was that they would do by nature what His law required, and as Rabbi Gamaliel said, as well as Jesus Himself, the entire law given by God to Moses, the Torah, can be summed up in this, “You will love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your strength, and all of your conscious mind; and you will love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus added to this the proscriptions to “love your enemies” and to “love one another as I have loved you.” So what was it that God would put in their inmost parts and write on their hearts? Love, and for all of their behaviors to be produced from this rather than what produces the harmful ones, which I have previously described as an abnormally formed amygdala which puts the person into a nearly constant survival mode based on threat assessment which is motivated by fear.

Another feature of the New Covenant which is frequently overlooked or dismissed is when He says, “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD…” Consider this in the light also of 1 John 4:7-8 which reads, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”(KJV) Consider also, in reference to the human amygdala driving behavior through fear based threat assessment, that the Apostle also writes in the same chapter in verses 16-18, “And we have known and have trusted the love which the God holds within us. The God is love, and the person making their home in love makes their home in the God and the God makes His home within that person. By means of this, love has been brought to completion with us, so that we possess a freedom to speak on the day of decision, because just like that One is, we are also within this world. Fear doesn’t exist within love, but the love brought to completion tosses fear outside, because fear has discipline, yet the one being afraid hasn’t been brought to completion with the love.” (author’s translation)

So what is the New Covenant then? Is it about forgiveness and deliverance from a hellish afterlife? No. It is nothing short of God Himself becoming the source of the person’s behaviors. It is nothing short of bypassing or disengaging from the human amygdala, rendering it inert or on constant standby while God Himself, who is love, takes over and suppresses or disengages that survival response. If it is God Himself who is the source of behavior, is He going to murder, lie, steal, cheat, cause schisms, do drugs, commit adultery through you? No, of course not! In the New Covenant, rather than being concerned with finding a way to forgive us, we see God working to treat our neurological problem directly. The forgiveness we find in the New Covenant comes from agreeing with Him about our problem and seeking to do what He wants just as He said in Ezekiel 18, and not from a blood sacrifice as such.

Paul writes copiously about this, but you wouldn’t know it because of how English translations have rendered what he wrote. He uses the Greek word δικαιοω and its various cognates in order to describe it. Starting with an explanation of what we can observe about the problem, He then goes into how God solved it. The problem in the modern translations is that they almost uniformly translate it as “justify,” which is nothing short of a transliteration of the Latin rendering from the Vulgate, “iustifico,” which translates as “to act justly towards, do justice to, justify, pardon, forgive, vindicate,” all of which implies a strictly legal understanding of pardoning or acquitting someone from a crime. But the base meaning of δικαιοω is “to make or set right” in a wide variety of contexts. The legal context as with iustifico to be sure, but in many, many more as well. Its adjectival cognate δικαιος literally means “observant of duty or custom,” especially in a societal context, but also in a religious context. In other words, it means that the person who is δικαιος is doing what they are supposed to be doing, and δικαιοω is returning something or someone to the way it or they are supposed to be. The concept can also be applied to restoring something to fairness or balance which had been unfair or out of balance. And so the very underpinnings of Paul’s understanding of the New Covenant and salvation in his letters in general center around this concept of setting the person right. But what did that mean?

According to Paul, in Romans chapters six through eight, it meant the rendering inert or neutralization of Hamartia through death, and specifically, through the person being “grown together” by means of baptism with Jesus Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. As he writes, “knowing this that our old human being was crucified together with Him, so that the malfunctioning body would be neutralized, for us to no longer be enslaved to Hamartia, because the one having died has been made right from Hamartia” (Romans 6:6-7, author’s translation). And because we have been “grown together” with Jesus Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, as he wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, “deciding this, that if one person died in place of everyone, then all people died; and He died in place of everyone, so that those living no longer live for themselves but in place of the One having died in their place and risen.”

But then the question must be asked, if it wasn’t about payment or retribution for our crimes and wrongdoing, how could His death and resurrection make us right from an abnormal or malfunctioning amygdala? Here, I need to talk about the aftereffects of Near Death Experiences (NDEs), and first I am going to quote those scientists who study the phenomenon:

  "Regardless of their cause, NDEs can permanently and dramatically alter the individual experiencer’s attitudes, beliefs, and values. The literature on the aftereffects of NDEs has focused on the beneficial personal transformations that often follow. A recent review of research into the characteristic changes following NDEs found the most commonly reported to be loss of fear of death; strengthened belief in life after death; feeling specially favored by God; a new sense of purpose or mission; heightened self-esteem; increased compassion and love for others; lessened concern for material gain, recognition, or status; greater desire to serve others; increased ability to express feelings; greater appreciation of, and zest for, life; increased focus on the present; deeper religious faith or heightened spirituality; search for knowledge; and greater appreciation for nature. These aftereffects have been corroborated by interviews with near-death experiencers’ significant others and by long-term longitudinal studies."
(Greyson, Bruce. "Getting Comfortable With Near Death Experiences: An Overview of Near-Death Experiences." Mo Med. 2013 Nov-Dec;110(6):475–481. PMCID: PMC6179792)

A longer list of the aftereffects are:

(From "Aftereffects of Near-death States" by by P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D.)

• Near-death experiencers come to love and accept others without the usual attachments and conditions society expects. They perceive themselves as equally and fully loving of each and all, openly generous, excited about the potential and wonder of each person they see. Their desire is to be a conduit of universal love. Confused family members tend to regard this sudden switch in behavior as oddly threatening, as if their loved one had become aloof, unresponsive, even uncaring and unloving. Some mistake this "unconditional" way of expressing joy and affection (heart-centered rather than person-centered) as flirtatious disloyalty. Divorce can result.

• One of the reasons life seems so different afterward is because the experiencer now has a basis of comparison unknown before. Familiar codes of conduct can lose relevance or disappear altogether as new interests take priority. Such a shift in reference points can lead to a childlike naivete. With the fading of previous norms and standards, basic caution and discernment can also fade. It is not unusual to hear of near-death experiencers being cheated, lied to, or involved in unpleasant mishaps and accidents. Once they are able to begin integrating what happened to them, discernment usually returns.

• Most experiencers develop a sense of timelessness. They tend to "flow" with the natural shift of light and dark, and display a more heightened awareness of the present moment and the importance of being "in the now." Making future preparations can seem irrelevant to them. This behavior is often labeled "spaciness" by others, who do their best to ignore the change in perception, although seldom do they ignore the shift in speech. That's because many experiencers refer to their episode as if it were a type of "divider" separating their "former" life from the present one.

• There's no denying that experiencers become quite intuitive afterward. Psychic displays can be commonplace, such as: out-of-body episodes, manifestation of "beings" met in near-death state, "remembering" the future, finishing another's sentence, "hearing" plants and animals "speak." This behavior is not only worrisome to relatives and friends, it can become frightening to them. A person's religious beliefs do not alter or prevent this amplification of faculties and stimuli. Yet, experiencers willing to learn how to control and refine these abilities, consider them beneficial.

• Life paradoxes begin to take on a sense of purpose and meaning, as forgiveness tends to replace former needs to criticize and condemn. Hard driving achievers and materialists can transform into easy-going philosophers; but, by the same token, those more relaxed or uncommitted before can become energetic "movers and shakers," determined to make a difference in the world. Personality reversals seem to depend more on what's "needed" to round out the individual's inner growth than on any uniform outcome. Although initially bewildered, families can be so impressed by what they witness that they, too, change-making the experience a "shared event."

• The average near-death experiencer comes to regard him or herself as "an immortal soul currently resident within a material form so lessons can be learned while sojourning in the earthplane." They now know they are not their body; many go on to embrace the theory of reincarnation. Eventually, the present life, the present body, becomes important and special again.

• What was once foreign becomes familiar, what was once familiar becomes foreign. Although the world is the same, the experiencer isn't. Hence, they tend to experiment with novel ways to communicate, even using abstract and grandiose terms to express themselves. With patience and effort on everyone's part, communication can improve and life can resume some degree of routine. But, the experiencer seems ever to respond to a "tune" no one else can hear (this can continue lifelong).

(Copied from  https://iands.org/ndes/about-ndes/common-aftereffects.html)

Atheists become pastors, selfish people become selfless, ordinary people develop paranormal abilities; and as a person exceptionally familiar with the New Testament narratives and letters, I cannot help but see the parallels with the experiences of the early Christians which were written about therein. I also cannot help but recognize the emphasis placed on "dying to self," "dying with Christ," and as Paul wrote point-blank in his letter to the Colossians as to why they were to be mindful of the things within the heavenly realms instead of minding the things on earth, "because you died and your life is hidden with Christ inside God."

     Jesus taught that His followers needed to die to themselves, and the embrace of this death is the underpinning of all Christian practice. As Paul also wrote in his letter to the Romans, "Don't you know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were then buried together with Him through the baptism into His death so that just like Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father so also we should walk in a freshness of life." I read the list of aftereffects of an NDE, and it seems like that is exactly what these folks are experiencing after literally returning from being clinically dead, sometimes for relatively long stretches of time.

     Thinking again about where it says in Romans 6, "The person who died has been made right from Hamartia," as it relates to the aftereffects experienced by people who have had Near Death Experiences or literal "Death Experiences" and have returned to life. That is, people who have literally died for a period of time (sometimes quite extended) with either brain death, the stopping of the heart, or both, and resuscitated (or resurrected). The thought which occurred to me is that this is literally a mechanic of death and resurrection regardless of how it happens. That is, a disengagement from one's malfunctioning responses and engagement with the Logos of God, that immaterial part of oneself suppressed by the malfunctioning amygdala, is a natural and normal result of death and resurrection as is evidenced by people who have had NDEs and consistently display a greater love, joy, peace, compassion, loss of a fear of death, a greater interest in spiritual things, a greater sense of connection with God, and even paranormal or supernormal abilities regardless of the belief system they started with.

And so this is the answer to why Jesus Christ died, voluntarily sacrificed Himself, in the place of every human being. So that every human being would be able to free from the domination of their abnormally functioning amygdala by experiencing death and resurrection without actually having to physically go through it, that is, that they would be free to choose God Himself as their source of behavior rather than this bit of malfunctioning flesh. And this is the assumption which Paul makes throughout his letters, urging those to whom he is writing to choose to “operate with the Spirit” rather than with the flesh; to remain connected with the Head of the body, the Logos who is Jesus Christ of whom we are all members, pieces, and fractals, and who is identified with the God Himself. And he is clear about one’s options in this matter. One is either enslaved to one’s abnormal amygdala, one’s flesh, or one willingly enslaves themselves to the God of whom they are a part, the Spirit. There are no other options.

And what does this have to do with the afterlife then? Actually, not a whole lot. Because the understanding I’ve come to is that the salvation which the New Testament teaches has very little to do with where one goes when one dies, and everything to do with being freed from Hamartia in this world, in the here and now. The salvation which is taught has to do with being freed from the harmful behaviors caused by our constant, fear based survival responses, and being free to communicate once more with that part of ourselves which is one with God Himself. It is about the realization of the New Covenant, and having the heart and will of God activated and written within each of us so that we do not cause harm to one another, and so that we love as He loves because He is the one loving through us.

And how do we actualize this? By being told it happened, and trusting that it is true enough to where we act on it. It is like being told there is a billion dollar bank account with your name on it. You have to trust that it is true in order to make use of it. If you don’t trust that, if you don’t believe the person who tells you, then there’s no way you can make use of it.

The Evolution of My Teaching on the Neurological Basis of Hamartia - Conclusion and a New Line of Inquiry

      In my previous posts, I laid out the steps which led me to formulate the hypothesis that Hamartia, or the "sin nature," was both biological and hereditary in nature. That it came down to an abnormally formed amygdala in human beings as compared to other primates, that this malformed amygdala produced the distinctly human phenomenon called "morality," that it produced what we know as the "ego" or self-identity, and that it is directly or indirectly responsible for why all modern humans, that is, all descendants of 'adam experience death.

     In this concluding post, I wanted to briefly add one more piece of information which I recently became aware of which also pertains to this discussion, and this is about the genes which are responsible for the development and formation of the human amygdala, and specifically, the STMN1 gene which is responsible for the production of Stathmin.

     I had originally thought that there would be no way to discern which gene or which genes might be responsible for Hamartia in human beings. Then, testing that assumption, I did a Google search and asked the question. The answer the AI search bot gave back, and the journal links it led me to were far more than I was expecting. As it turns out, we know quite a bit about which genes are responsible, "stathmin (STMN1)" and the "serotonin transporter (SLC6A4)" gene which are linked to variations in amygdala size and function, potentially impacting emotional processing; additionally, genes related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) like PTEN, ADNP, and FOXP1 are expressed in the developing amygdala and may play a role in its structure." (AI citation from Google Search based on journal articles from the NIH).

     What's really interesting about Stathmin (produced by the gene STMN1), which is a protein that regulates the cell cytoskeleton, is that when it is deficient in mice, they have a decrease in innate and learned fear, but an increase in social interactions. Furthermore, variations in the size of the amygdala is "significantly associated with allelic variation in the stathmin (STMN1) and serotonin transporter (SLC6A4) genes, which have been linked to healthy and disordered affective processing." (Wikipedia) Stathmin is also implicated in the growth of cancerous cells as well.

      I do not know all the implications of this new piece of information, but as I have previously discussed, Hamartia is the abnormal development of the human amygdala (as compared with other primates) leading to an overreactive or hyperreactive human survival response, dominated largely by the fear response; fear of not having what is needed for survival and fear of perceived threats. This fear response obstructs the brain's ability to communicate with the Logos, or God Himself who is Love, of which every human soul is a part. That a reduction in Stathmin, which is produced by a key gene in the amygdala's formation, should also decrease innate and learned fear and should result in an increase in social interaction (in addition to being associated with various disorders and illnesses) seems to me to immediately suggest a potential candidate, STMN1, for a flawed or malfunctioning gene responsible for Hamartia as I have described it. Speculating, perhaps it was originally weaker in our pre-fruit ancestors, and during human development, produced an amygdala which would only respond to genuine threats rather than everything. It is just speculation, but it's a new line of inquiry to look into, and once again, for me it lends more strength to the validity of my hypothesis.

     It is my genuine hope that this cross-disciplinary approach involving the theological, the psychological, the neurological, and now the genetic will help to produce a better understanding of our inherited human flaw and ironic propensity towards negativity and self-destruction even as we seek our own survival at any cost.

The Evolution of My Teaching on The Neurological Basis of Hamartia - Part 4, Death

      Having covered the physical basis of Hamartia, how the abnormal human amygdala produces human moral thinking, and how it produced the ego, I want now to turn to the subject of how, as Paul put it, that "death entered the world through Hamartia." This is considered one of the defining contributions or hallmarks of Hamartia, that the only reason we die is because of it. What, if anything does an abnormal amygdala have to do with death? First, we have to look at why the death of an animal organism, such as human beings, occurs.

    In an article I was reading at one point, in an interview with him, Molecular Biologist Venki Ramakrishnan says, "Aging is an accumulation of chemical damage to the molecules inside our cells, which damages the cells themselves, and therefore the tissue, and then eventually us as an organism. Surprisingly, we start aging when we’re in the womb, although at that point, we’re growing faster than we’re accumulating damage. Aging happens throughout our lives, right from the very beginning. The body has evolved lots of mechanisms to correct age-related damage to our DNA and to any poor-quality proteins we produce. Without ways to correct these sorts of problems, we would never live as long as we do. Still, over time, damage begins to outpace our ability to repair. Think of the body as like a city containing lots of systems that must work together. Once an organ system critical to our survival fails, we die. For example, if our muscles become so frail that our heart stops beating, it can’t pump the blood containing the oxygen and nutrients our organs need and we die. When we say someone dies, we mean the death of them as an individual. In fact, when we die, most of ourselves, such as our organs, are alive. This is why the organs of accident victims can be donated to transplant." (DuLong, Jessica. "Why do we die? The latest on aging and immortality from a Nobel Prize-winning scientist." CNN.com, Tue April 9, 2024.)

     In an online Chemistry textbook from Western Oregon Universtiy, it says, "In multicellular organisms, the response to DNA damage can result in two major physiological consequences: (1) Cells can undergo cell cycle arrest, repair the damage and re-enter the cell cycle, or  (2) cells can be targeted for cell death (apoptosis) and removed from the population." (Flatt, P.M. (2019) Biochemistry – Defining Life at the Molecular Level.  Published by Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR (CC BY-NC-SA). Chapter 12.3.)

     So, it stands to reason that, if this damage never outpaced the organism's ability to repair it, the organism would never grow old and die a natural death. It would be functionally immortal, assuming no accidental death would have occurred. I should mention that the body under constant psychological stress (such as a constant survival mode) will eventually begin to show deleterious effects. At the very least it will impact the immune system and the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain. This alone could have possibly tweaked the human body's damage response systems to where they stopped being able to respond as well after so long, but even if this was a main culprit, I think the Biblical text offers us another explanation as well.

     The second thing to take into consideration is the role death plays in the cycle of life. In short, where the entire environment and ecosystem is concerned, there could be no life without death. Plants (and other animals) must die in order for animals to live. Animals (and other plants) must die in order for plants to live. There is no exception to this rule of nature. With life comes death, and out of death is produced new life. This was as true during the time of our original ancestors as it is today. Even just plucking a fruit from a tree causes that fruit to die, because it has been removed from its source of nutrients. A nature without death or decay is a static existence akin to statuary or window dressing as there would be no eating (neither need nor source of food), no growth, and no new life. Death and decay in their proper place is absolutely necessary for new life and growth to occur as the new life feeds on the dead life.

     From an evolutionary and geologic perspective it makes no sense that there was a time in Earth's history when death did not exist at all. Found within the geologic record are fossils of plants and animals which died as far back as half a billion years ago. Our Homo Sapiens ancestors didn't emerge until rough three hundred thousand years ago, and if we are to take the Genesis account seriously as to the timing and order of things, didn't start wearing clothing until between seventy and a hundred thousand years ago. If this is true, then the events surrounding the onset of Hamartia occurred hundreds of millions of years after death was introduced into the ecosystem.

     Finally, on this subject, in Genesis 2, our ancestor is told, literally, "on the day you eat from it (also possibly 'from them' in Hebrew) you will die a death." The Greek Septuagint translation renders it "you (pl.) will die by death." Notice also that it does not say "immediate death." If there had previously been no death in the world at all, how would our ancestor have known what that meant? It would have been a nonsense statement and meaningless, because our ancestor would have had no frame of reference for it.

     So then how can Hamartia have been the cause of death if death was already in the world? The key, in my opinion, to understanding the answer to this question is that the emphasis in the Biblical texts always refer to this imposition of death as applying specifically to our ancestors and their descendants specifically. Death was already a part of the ecosystem, except for our specific ancestors. The warning given was for "them" to not eat from a particular tree, or kind of tree, or else they would die. There was nothing said about the other animals eating from it.

     There was however another tree placed in the garden described as the "tree of life." What's interesting about this one is that there was no prohibition initially placed on eating its fruit. It's reasonable to assume that our ancestors were eating from its fruit just fine up until the point that they ate from the wrong tree.

      At the time these events were taking place, presuming that they coincided with the beginning of the wearing of clothes, Homo Sapiens shared this planet with at least two other species of Homo, and possibly more: Neanderthalensis and Homo Erectus (there is also the possibility of Homo Floresiensis as well). Furthermore, there had been several migrations of these species of Homo out of Africa and into various parts of Asia and Europe as well as those remaining in Africa. According to Genesis 2, God took our ancestors from where they first arose and placed them in a garden "in the east." It is not an unreasonable conclusion that our ancestors were actually separated from the larger populations of Homo which existed and were singled out for relocation, either by migration or other means. And so, rather than just having two individual Homo Sapiens in the entire world, we have perhaps a family group or clan of specific Homo Sapiens being singled out and relocated, and it is this family group which was affected by Hamartia and through tens of millennia, through breeding or violence, became the dominant, and then only species of Homo left today. And one of the primary and accessible food sources for that family group, and only that family group, was the "tree of life."

      Another data point here is the unnaturally long lifespans of recorded Biblical figures between "Adam" and Isaac or Jacob. According to the Biblical text, Adam lived to 930 years old before succumbing to death. His descendants all lived for hundreds of years, though the length of lifespan steadily decreased from one generation to the next until, as the psalm written by Moses states, a man has only 70 years, or by reason of strength, 80. It should be noted that he himself is recorded to have lived for 120 years.

      Speculating a little bit, it stands to reason that the fruit of the tree of life held a natural compound that supported and induced these repair responses in such a way so that the natural cellular repair systems were able to keep up with DNA damage at the molecular level and not be outpaced by it once the person who ate it had reached physical maturity. My thought here is that the fruit of the tree of life might have induced the mechanisms within the body to remove the cells with damaged DNA far more aggressively than normal, effectively scrubbing them on a regular basis after being consumed. With no damaged cells, the mature adult would not age, and thus would not die from old age. They would be effectively immortal as long as they continued to eat from this tree on a regular basis, barring physically fatal accidents. Also speculating, I would suspect that aggressive apoptosis or ketosis induction was not the only effect this fruit would have, but it would possibly be the major one in terms of anti-aging, and thus anti-dying properties.

     By exiling our ancestors from their garden home as a consequence of eating the wrong fruit, and making it impossible to ingest the fruit from the tree of life again, they began to suffer the effects of what we would now consider normal aging. Damaged and mutated cells began to build up and their bodies could no longer remove them at a sufficient pace. They became mortal, and their bodies subject to disease, old age, and finally, natural death like any other animal. And so, through the choice our ancestors made, they brought death to all of their descendants, that is, every human being alive today.

The Evolution of My Teaching on The Neurological Basis of Hamartia - Part 3, the Origin of the Ego or Self-Identity

      So far I have covered not only that Hamartia is physical in nature, but how and what part of the human brain it affects, as well as how this abnormality in the human brain produces the distinctly human concepts of “good” and “bad,” that is, human morality. After I examined these questions, I then turned to asking how this abnormal amygdala and the overreactive survival responses which result could have anything to do with what is often called the human “ego” or “self,” as this is frequently implicated where Hamartia is concerned and even associated with Hamartia. How could the human ego be produced as a result of these things?

     In order to answer this question, I have to introduce a concept which is squarely within the realm of theology or even philosophy. This is the concept of the "imago dei," that is, the “image of God.” This is a concept that Christian theologians and philosophers have debated endlessly as far as what it actually means. We first encounter it in Genesis 1 where Moses writes that humanity was created in the image of God both male and female. Was it referring to a literal physical image? Was it referring to a moral quality, character, or personality? Origen, writing in the third century CE, and equating it with spirit described it in Greek as the νοος, that is, the "mind or intellect." As God is described as a consuming fire in the Scriptures, so also Origen saw the human νοος or spirit as being at the very least made in the image of this same fire.

     The other significant place in the Scriptures where the imago dei is mentioned is in the letter of Paul the Apostle to the Colossians, where Jesus Christ is specifically called the "image of the unseen God," and this is where I want to focus. Here I want to draw from both Paul's writings and John's, and I think you'll see why. John records Jesus as saying, "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father," and also "The Father and I are one." In the beginning of John's Gospel, he explicitly identifies Jesus Christ using the Greek word λογος (Logos), which in their cultural worldview was enormously significant. In his letters, where John uses the word "Logos", Paul uses the word translated as "Christ" as virtually interchangeable with John's usage. And so it is not a stretch to identify the Logos as in fact the image of God. But how does that help us here? The ancient Hellenistic worldview was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, and in particular in the first century, the Stoic philosophy and ethics which became as ubiquitous within the Roman empire as Protestant Christian ethics and worldview are within American culture. Far from originating as a Christian concept, the idea of the Logos as being identified with the God and "firstborn of all creation" was foundational to the pagan Stoic worldview long before its entry into 1st century Jewish thought, and then into Christian thought. This is significant because along with this was the idea that every human being contained a piece or, literally, a shred of that same divine Logos within them. Epictetus in his discourses is adamant that all human beings are, in this way, born from the God and could be considered children or sons of the God (and thus should start acting like it). Paul, in his letters, echoes this very same idea when he talks about people being members or "parts" of the "Body of Christ" joined together with one another and connected to the Head, as the one governing the whole, which is Christ Himself, or the Logos. And so, just as the Logos is the image of God, so also every human being contains the image of God, being a part of the Logos. Without spending a lot more time on this subject so that we may return to the problem of the ego, I want to add that this same concept can be found in other philosophies and major religious thought as well, such as Hinduism where there is the idea of the universal Atman from which all human beings possess a part, an atman. There is also the many, many testimonies from people who have had Near Death Experiences who, upon being resuscitated have reported experiences confirming a oneness between their own conscious awareness and a universal consciousness. Given that this image of God, according to Scripture, is the state in which human beings were originally created, and the example of this is the Logos incarnate who declared, "if you have seen Me, you have seen the Father," it stands to reason that the image of God as exemplified by Jesus Christ is the original, natural, functional state for all human beings.

     So then, if every human being is, in some way, a piece or part of the Logos, or a piece or part of God, why then doesn't every human being automatically follow the same example that Jesus Christ set? If this is our natural state, being one with the God in some real way, why are we not immediately aware of it? Why do we not have access from birth to it like Jesus, the Logos incarnate, did? The answer is Hamartia.

     From the purely theological or philosophical, I want now to return to what can be observed and studied. Some time ago, a friend recommended a book to me, Healing The Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, (Fisher, Janina. New York: Routledge, 2017), which talks about the neurobiological basis of compartmentalization of the mind. The fascinating premise of Dr. Fisher is that rather than just a response to extreme trauma in childhood such as produces Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), the brain actually uses either total or partial fragmentation, or "self-alienation," in order to cope with trauma as a rule. While DID is the most extreme version of this, and the easiest to see as the "personalities" are distinctly compartmentalized and separate from one another, partial compartmentalization can be seen in people who might otherwise appear on the surface to have a fully integrated personality. In the book, which is incredibly well documented, she describes people who are able to put on a separate "self" in order to function with relative normalcy in work, school, and social situations, but internally remain broken and traumatized from past wounds often succumbing to self-destructive behavior and addiction in order to quiet that still hurting "self." In other words, this person, even though a single identity, can operate as two separate personalities because the brain compartmentalized the core personality to protect itself while creating another to take the trauma in a similar, though milder way to DID.

     As I had previously stated, the brain's survival system was only meant to deal with physical threats. It was meant to react to the threat or survival need by taking control, dealing with it, and then go into standby, so to speak. But the primary driver, if you will, was to be this image of God consciousness, fully aware of and in communication with its governing "person," the Logos, or the God. But with the amygdala enlarged and restructured from its original parameters, the human brain is constantly in a survival response to varying degrees, and so the system can't or won't go into standby and allow the image of God consciousness to resume full control. Because our survival response system is always active due to the abnormal amygdala, it reacts with fear, aggression, or a craving for things like food or sex to nearly everything. This results in a total disruption of communication between the Source of our consciousness and our brain. This can only be traumatic to the brain which was not originally designed to function without it. Being then blinded to the genuine source of identity and control, the brain panics and devises its own in order for it to continue to function. The human brain is reacting to the trauma of fear induced separation from that Source of consciousness. That is, the person we identify with from birth, our core personality, is itself the brain's first and original compartmentalization in response to the trauma of being "blinded" from the Source of consciousness due to the malfunctioning and overactive survival response. The "self" we identify as is itself a fiction created by the brain in order to continue functioning in its perpetual, emergency panic state. This "self" is what we call the "ego." One author, R.J. Spina, uses the acronym EMI which stands for Ego/Mind/Identity when referencing the brain produced ego or self, and I find it a very useful description.

     With what then does the brain create this compartmentalized personality, being unable to communicate with its original governor? It turns to those things which trigger its survival threat or need response, that is, those things that please or displease it specifically, and those things within its physical, sensory environment. I wrote at one point regarding this, "Furthermore, our assignation of "good" or "bad" to those things which please or displease, what the brain's fight/flight/feeding/sex response system mistakenly registers as survival necessities or survival threats, further reinforces those things as a part of our personal identity with which the ego uses to define itself, being a product of that malfunctioning fear survival response." and also, "The things which please or displease us we latch onto as what we identify ourselves with. I like chocolate cake. Me liking chocolate cake is a part of my identity. I was born in America. If this pleases me, then it becomes a part of my identity which I treasure. If it displeases me, it becomes a part of my identity I am ashamed of, but still a part of my identity. I write rambles, and it has become a part of my identity that I do so. Being a Christian has been a part of my identity for a long time. But the point is that the ego builds the illusion of identity around those things which either please or displease, which it either agrees with or disagrees with. This is why it can be so psychologically threatening when something which is agreed with or disagreed with is challenged. Even something as inane as fictional stories or characters. My agreement with, for example, that 'Han shot first' in the original Star Wars becomes a part of my identity, and who I consider myself to be. Thus, when it is changed by the film maker, it threatens that identity (in reality, I don't personally care; I figured that was George Lucas' call and he can do whatever he wants with his film), and thus threatens me psychologically." Much to my own surprise, I discovered that I was not the first to recognize the connection between the EMI and the survival responses. Thich Nhat Hanh writes in The Art of Living (New York: HarperCollins: 2017), "In Buddhist Psychology, the part of our consciousness that has a tendency to create a sense of self is known in Sanskrit as manas. ... Manas manifests from deep in our consciousness. It is our survival instinct, and it always urges us to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Manas keeps saying, 'This is me; this is my body; this is mine,' because manas is unable to perceive reality clearly. Manas tries to protect and defend what it mistakenly thinks is a self." (p. 31) The EMI clings to various things in order to form a personal identity to define itself, even though it in itself is an illusion or delusion created by a brain which is not functioning according to its original parameters. Furthermore, because the ego or self-identity is compiled or aggregated from what the brain recognizes as needs or threats, likes or dislikes, attachments or aversions, and those things become integrated into the self-identity, any threat to the object of that attachment or aversion is seen as a threat to the ego or self-identity. Hence, the survival response is triggered when the object is perceived to be under threat just as if the person themselves was under threat.

     This is all well and good, but there can't possibly be any proof to this hypothesis of the formation of the ego, right? Absolute proof, no. But there are some interesting corroborations from spiritual writings and practices. The first, again, is Jesus Christ Himself. Paul, in his letters, was insistent that He was without Hamartia, and it has been the continuous teaching of Christianity that He was born without it. As He was born without it, He was identified with God as the Logos and image of God. As I wrote at one point, "It occurs to me that without the inherited malfunction, when Jesus Christ was born, His brain would not have been born in the same "panic mode" which the rest of us are born with. His brain would not have jury rigged an "emergency OS" so to speak. It wouldn't have needed to. He would have been born with His own name, His own free will and intellect, His own set of experiences, preferences, biology, and so on, but without the malfunctioning EMI which plagues the rest of us. He would have been born with full connection to, submission to, and cooperation with that Consciousness of I Am which is also the Foundation, the base upon which all of creation is coded or shaped. He would have been born enveloped in His Father's presence and love from the start without any kind of resistance to it. His personality, aside from the clearly human experiential and biological component, would have been otherwise entirely shaped by this unbroken connection with the Father, the Source. And these two non-competing components of His individual personality, Human and Source, if you will, can be observed from the Gospel writings. Jesus Christ represents a human being the way a human being was meant to function, with full connection and cooperation with the Source Consciousness, if you will, the Father from the start." 

     The second is that, in every spiritual and mystical tradition, one's ego or self-identity must be somehow set aside or disengaged from in order to experience a unity with God (or in the case of Buddhism, Nirvana). This includes Paul's writings as he writes at length in the sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters of his letter to the Romans about the need to die to one's "old man," synonymous with "the flesh," in order to function or operate by means of the Spirit. There is also where John says in his first letter that "The person who doesn't love doesn't know the God, because the God is love," and also, "love brought to completion tosses fear out." Paul writes as well, "Walk in the Spirit, and you will not bring the desires of the flesh to completion." And so there is this continuous understanding through the writings of the New Testament that either the flesh, corrupted by Hamartia, is in control, or the God is in control via the Spirit, but they are not in control at the same time, and cannot be. When the brain and body are under the control of the original governor, then the ego or self-identity produced by the malfunctioning amygdala cannot be because the love that God is will send the constant panic response of the amygdala into standby. When the amygdala is in control, it disrupts communication with the original governor and the ego or self-identity takes control. This can also be seen in the testimonies and reports of people who have experienced Near Death Experiences where the ego has been severely affected, and they report an increased love and compassion towards everyone else.

     While this post is longer than I intended, I hope it explains my evolution of thought regarding how Hamartia could produce the ego or self-identity.