Don't Stay Silent

 Don't stay silent. No matter who shouts you down, don't stay silent. "The shroud of the Dark Side is everywhere." Fear makes it stronger, and those spreading this shroud want you to be afraid. They want you to be silent. They want you to be obedient. They want you to be paralyzed. This is the time when we need to speak out the most and not give in to our fear. This is the time when we have to weigh our attachments to possessions, relationships, and even our own lives against what is right, compassionate, and true. Even if you don't think anyone is listening anymore, don't stay silent. As Jesus said, what is it worth if you gain the whole world yet lose your own soul? In the end, you will lose your possessions, you will lose your relationships, you will lose even your life. This comes for everyone regardless of who they are. But what you will keep, what you will never lose, are the choices you made, and you will carry those choices beyond this life even as you must leave everything else behind. Don't stay silent. Don't be enslaved to your fear. Become a mirror showing the whole world its true face, the one it tries so desperately to not look at.

Don't Lie About Being A Christian

 There's this hesitancy, this reluctance today to denounce someone who calls himself or herself a Christian as not one. It's understandable. The thinking is that if someone considers himself or herself a Christian, regardless of what theological branch of that tree they hail from, then they are one, and who is able to say otherwise? Except the authors of the New Testament didn't play that game, not when it came to how a person acted and lived their lives. They didn't play that game, and neither did those that followed them.

     The Apostle John himself is explicit in his language in his first letter, "If we should say that we hold communion with Him and should operate within the darkness, we are lying and not doing the truth; but if we should operate in the light like He is in the light, we hold communion with one another and the blood of Yeshua His Son cleanses us from every error. If we should say that we don't have the error, we are leading ourselves astray and the truth is not within us. If we should agree about our errors, He is trusted and right to drop our errors for us and cleanse us from every wrongdoing. If we should say that we haven't erred, we make Him a liar and His Logos isn't within us." And also, "The one claiming to make his home within Him is himself obligated to operate in the same way just like that One operated."

     They did not and would not have beaten around the bush. If you claim to be a Christian, a disciple of Jesus Christ and follower of the Way, and do not live as He taught or operate (walk) as He operated (walked) then you are a liar, regardless of what you say you believe, and they would have called you out on it. If the way you live your life is not marked by love first and foremost, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, patience, self-control, non-judgment, and even just the basics of what Jesus clearly taught, then you are not a Christian, no matter what church you attend, no matter how much you give in tithe, no matter what rules you otherwise keep.

     The earliest Christians, the followers of the Way, would have approached you and called you on your behavior and sought to guide you back onto the Way, gently or not so gently depending on who you were and how egregious it was. They would have approached you privately at least twice before calling you out in public, unless you were a member of church leadership. Then they would have called you out openly and immediately in front of everyone as Paul (and Jesus for that matter) did with Peter. They would not have hidden a church leader's offenses. They would not have covered it up to prevent embarrassment or prevent financial loss. They would have dealt with the person's going astray immediately to guide them back, or if they refused and continued in their own malfunctioning flesh, to remove them from the community until they came to their senses.

     If you don't care to actually follow Jesus Christ, at the very least, be honest about it. Don't claim His name while riding roughshod over the things He clearly taught. Doing so won't help you at all, and will likely put you into a worse position than if you were just honest about it. Don't claim to be a disciple if you're not going to follow the discipline. You just make yourself a liar, and no one is fooled except you.

The Modern Concept of "Hell" Is Not in the New Testament

      In the modern western worldview, the afterlife is divided generally into two realms, heaven and hell. Heaven is where the "good" people go, and hell is where the "bad" people go. There are variations on this concept, but this is the general idea. Especially in Christian circles, heaven and hell are realms in which the soul resides permanently within this worldview based on either their beliefs or actions within this life.

     It might surprise people to know that this was not necessarily the worldview of people in the first century, and this worldview is not what was taught in the New Testament. Nor does this worldview necessarily align with the thousands of testimonies from Near Death Experiencers around the world. This worldview emerged largely out of the Middle Ages and was heavily influenced by various theologians and writers until it emerged into the dichotomy we see today.

     In the Greek, there are three words which are traditionally translated as hell, but only one of them might carry the traditional meaning. The first word we encounter in the Greek New Testament is Hades. This is actually the name of the Greek Olympian god and ruler of the Underworld. In the Greek worldview, the sky was ruled by Zeus, the Seas were ruled by Poseidon, and the Underworld was ruled by Hades. Over time, Hades' name became synonymous with the realm he ruled. The Underworld was a realm with various different regions and geographical features including several rivers, such as the Styx and the Leithe. The three main regions of the Underworld were the Elysian Fields where the virtuous dead went (in which ere also the Isles of the Blessed where the most heroic, righteous, and virtuous would eventually find themselves), the Fields of Asphodel where those who were not virtuous but also not wholly evil were consigned, and Tartaros (which incidentally is the only word in Greek which occurs in the New Testament that might correspond to the traditional concept of Hell, and occurs in 2 Peter 2:4) where monstrous souls who had committed grave offenses were consigned. This is described as the Abyss, the pit where the monstrous Titans who had castrated and murdered their father, Ouranos, were chained forever. This word, "abysson" is found in Revelation 20:3. It should be noted that in the New Testament, Tartaros and the Abyss are described as prisons for those Angels or Spiritual Beings who rebelled against God. They aren't described as prisons for human souls.

     The final word which is traditionally translated as Hell from the Greek is "ge'enna" or "Gehenna." This word is a Hellenization of the Hebrew term "Gey-Hinnom." Most immediately, this referred to the Valley of Hinnom which was, at one time, a place of child sacrifice to Molech and then later a garbage dump as well as a place where the corpses of criminals and unclaimed bodies were dumped. Fires were kept going to incinerate the refuse, and as you can imagine, there were worms and maggot everywhere. That is the real-world image given by this word. But in Rabbinic literature in the first century and even up to this day in Jewish thought, Gehenna took on a spiritual meaning. It came to mean a place for those souls who had sinned or committed wrongdoing in this life to undergo correction as a kind of purification before passing on into the presence of God. In a way, the meaning of Gehenna was more synonymous with the Catholic concept of Purgatory than the modern concept of a permanent Hell. In Jewish thought, a soul could only remain in Gehenna for up to eleven months, no matter what. After the eleven months, they were allowed to move on. Gehenna was not a pleasant place to be, but the key idea here is that it was not permanent, nor was it ever seen as permanent.

     Why then does the New Testament describe "Eternal Punishment"? Well, honestly, that depends on how you translate the words which are used in reference to this "punishment." First, the word used in reference to "punishment" in the afterlife is always "kolasis." This word doesn't mean vengeance or retribution. It means correction, checking the growth, or disciplinary action. Second, the word used which is translated as "eternal" in reference to "kolasis" is always "aionios." There are two words which can be translated as "Eternal" in Greek, but they have specifically different meanings. The first is "aidios," which means "forever, without end." This word is never applied to this disciplinary action in the afterlife in the New Testament. The second, as mentioned, is "aionios," which is a little more nuanced. It doesn't actually mean "without end." The meaning of "aionios" comes closer to the idea of "outside of time or undefined time." The gods in Greek mythology existed "aionios," but not necessarily "aidios." Aionios as a concept reflects a realm where time has no meaning. It's ageless. It could be five minutes, it could be a thousand years. It's a realm where all times are now, and past, present, and future don't apply. So, the disciplinary action being described as taking place in this Gehenna where the worm doesn't die and the fire isn't quenched isn't being described as being forever within a timeline, but taking place in a realm where time doesn't exist. And whether it's five minutes or eleven months is irrelevant except with the understanding that it's not permanent, and while the end of it is undefined, there will be an end to it.

     Finally, among the many Near Death Experience testimonies are a number of what would be described as hellish experiences. These are much fewer than the heavenly encounters, but they do exist and they always leave those who experience it profoundly shaken and changed. What is important to note as common among these negative NDEs is that the person always seems to find themselves in a dark, nearly pitch black pit like region where they can't see hardly anything at all. They're always in some kind of torment, either emotional or seemingly being able to feel pain. There's usually some kind of negative beings present ready and waiting to inflict more excruciating pain and injury on the person. And finally, there's no sense of time. It is almost always described as it could have been minutes, it could have been thousands of years. From what I have read and heard, most of the people who encounter this were self-admittedly incredibly selfish and self-serving going into it and recognized that fact while they were experiencing it. They continuously reflected on how they lived their lives and the people they hurt either by commission or omission. What is incredibly important to note here is that many if not most came to the point where they cried out to God from this hellish place, having realized their mistakes, and God responded, usually by sending someone, usually Jesus Christ Himself or an angel of some kind, to retrieve them from there, heal them from their hellish experience, and bring them into a paradaisical realm where they would then experience the full presence and love of God unfiltered. They would then go through a life review, experiencing both how they had helped others and had hurt others from the perspective of the other person. Some then were given the choice of staying or returning, others were directly told they were being sent back.

     Some may point out two specific passages which, in English translations, would seem to indicate that punishment is "forever" and that those cast into the lake of fire would be tormented "forever." These two passages are Matthew 25:41, 46 and Revelation 20:10. To sum up briefly, the first passage is the judgment of the "sheep" and the "goats," that is, those who were kind and compassionate to the least of these, and those who weren't. In Matthew 25:41 it reads, in the NABRE translation, "Then  he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." And in 25:46, it says, "And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." As I wrote previously, the word here used for "eternal" is not "aidios" but "aionios," or one of its cognates, in both instances. That is, outside of time, but not forever. Secondly, the word for punishment is, also as previously mentioned, "kolasis," which means "disciplinary action, correction," and in particular, "checking the growth of a plant." It does not mean vengeance or retribution.

     In Revelation 20:10, in the NABRE it is very traditionally translated, "The Devil who had led them astray was thrown into the pool of fire and sulfur, where the beast and false prophet were. There they will be tormented day and night forever and ever." This sounds pretty straightforward... until you realize that the word "torment" is a mistranslation in this context, as potentially is "forever and ever." The word translated as "torment" is "basanizo," and it actually means "to investigate, put to the test, to examine closely, cross-question, interrogate." It can also have the meaning of "to question by torture," but the main concept of the word is the questioning, investigating, and examining, not the torture. The phrase in Greek translated as "forever and ever" is "eis tous aionas ton aionwn." Literally, it means, "into the ages of ages." This is an idiomatic way in Greek of expressing an undefined number of eons, that is, a very long, but indeterminate period of time or even outside of time. It implies that the end point is not known, but there may or may not be an endpont. It means that there is no certainty either way. 

     When applied to the idea of Gehenna, or when taken with the testimonies of NDEers who have had hellish experiences, the understanding of these original Greek words and phrases only reinforces the idea that this torment or hellish experience is not meant to be permanent and that release from it is not only possible, but intended once the person held within has come to their senses. It is undefined because that release is contingent on the person themselves coming to their senses and crying out to God.

     Any time you see the word "hell" in a translation of the New Testament, it is rendering one of the words which I have just described, and the concepts which the original disciples and those who heard Jesus and first read the Apostles' letters were not what the modern word "hell" evokes. In their minds, at the very least, it was a temporary, disciplinary realm meant to purify the person in error and bring them to their senses, much like the NDEers describe from their own experiences. Those truly "hellish" realms like the Abyss, Tartaros, were intended for monstrous, powerful, and dangerous spiritual beings to keep them prisoner so they couldn't harm anyone. They were never intended for human souls, pieces and shreds of the Logos who is Himself born from the God, which were always intended to return to the God from whom they were born.

Love The Person Located Next To You Like Yourself

 To love your neighbor isn't some grand gesture. It doesn't require going out and doing what is considered great humanitarian work (though there is certainly nothing wrong with that!). It is literally and simply to love the person next to you like you love yourself, whoever it might be. Literally the person standing right next to you at the moment, or sitting right next to you at the moment in whatever moment and location in which you happen to be. 

     If the person standing next to you is a family member, love them like yourself. If it is a stranger whom you've never seen before, love them like yourself. If they're homeless, love them like yourself. If they're wealthy, love them like yourself. If the person standing next to you is an immigrant, love them like yourself. If the person standing next to you at the moment happens to be gay, happens to be transgender, happens to be from a different ethnic, social, financial, cultural, or linguistic background from yourself, love them like yourself. See them as yourself. Try to step into their shoes and into their worldview. If you had experienced what they had, would you have made different choices from them? If you had been raised the same way, if you had the same biology, the same neural connections, the same history and culture which they had, would you have done anything differently from them? 

     To love is the opposite of fear. Loving the other person as yourself is to stop seeing the other person as a threat or something to fear, and to start seeing them as no different than who you are. The same needs for food, water, shelter, security, love, companionship; the same desires for success in their endeavors, and the same or similar flaws that you yourself have. It means to turn away from your fear and anxiety and to disengage from it.

     But it starts with the person right next to you, no matter who they are. It starts with those closest to you in physical and not just relational proximity. If you live alone in an apartment, it starts with the person living in the apartment next to you. If you have a spouse and children, it starts with them. If you are at work, it starts with your coworkers closest at hand, no matter who they are. It starts with who is right next to you right now in this moment.

     And when we love our neighbor as ourselves, we love God and know God. If we truly love God, then we will love the person next to us. If God is our Source, and each one of us carries a part or shred of His Logos and His Spirit, no matter who we are, then to love one another is to love God. To treat one another how we want to be treated is to treat God that way. To love your enemy is also to love the God of whom your enemy still holds a part, and to recognize that your enemy who hates you is a family member who is ill.

     And the inverse is also true. To hate the person next to us is to hate God Himself. To mistreat the person next to us is to mistreat God Himself. To injure, lie to, hunt, and prosecute the person next to us is to do so to God Himself. And there is a difference between vengeance and justice, because the justice of God seeks to reconcile, restore, and heal the offending person, and not to destroy them as though they were a threat.

     But it starts with the person next to you, right now, in this moment of time. It doesn't matter who it is you see, because whoever it is, whatever their disposition, by loving them you love God.

By Fighting At All, The Jedi Lost

 "By fighting at all, the Jedi lost." So reads the novelization of "The Revenge of the Sith" by Matthew Stover as he describes Order 66, the Clone Wars, and how it was all set up as a perfect trap to weaken, blind, and then destroy the Jedi.

     These words, I think perfectly summarize the struggle within me that I've been trying to put words to all day. As Yoda taught, "Fear leads to Anger. Anger leads to Hate. Hate leads to Suffering." Unless one is exceptionally disciplined, fighting is born from aggression which is born from anger which is ultimately born within the human brain as a response to a perceived threat, that is, from being afraid that something undesirable might happen, or something desirable might not happen. By acting on fear or anger, one acts from the flesh, that is, from the dysfunctional human amygdala which is the gatekeeper to the hypothalamus which governs the fear/aggression/feeding/sexual responses. By allowing your fear or anger to dictate your decisions, your flesh is firmly in control, even if you have the best of intentions. And if your flesh is in control, you lose. It doesn't matter if you want to save everyone, bring justice to the world, and restore the balance. If you are functioning purely from your own brain's wiring, you lose because it cannot help but go sideways and cause harm. It does not mean to, but it will because it is not working the way it was intended to work.

     As it was for the Jedi, so it is for the disciple of Jesus Christ. To act, speak, or make decisions from fear is to enslave yourself to the flesh, and not the spirit. It is your own malfunctioning brain in control, even if you're trying to serve the truth, compassion, and empathy. If your fear or anger, however righteous, is in control, then the spirit will not be. If your fear or anger is dictating what you do and say, then Jesus Christ will not be. 

     I have been ruminating on this long and hard today, looking at my responses and reactions where what is happening to my country is concerned. Am I responding to a threat, or are my responses born from love? Are my responses from fear or anger, or are they from the spirit? Is it the Logos being channeled through me, or am I responding to a perceived threat through the lens of my human malfunction? And if I am responding from fear, then I need to stop where I am, take a step back, and focus on remaining in Him once more, making my home in Him. Building my house upon the bedrock, above where the flash floods rage across the sand of the wadi and destroying everything in their path. 

     I need to focus on the reality that this person, this life is not home. It is an avatar in a very complex RPG that will one day expire, and I will move on. All of these things that are happening are meant to trigger our malfunctioning human threat responses and enslave us once more to the flesh and hold us there. And I am all too easily triggered. 

     There have been many regimes like the one now in control of the executive branch of the United States. It is disillusioning that it is now happening here, and that is psychologically threatening. If I allow that perceived threat to trigger the fear response, then I willfully surrender myself to that domino chain as I become enslaved to fear, anger, hatred, and being the cause of my own suffering. As as I am overwhelmed by the raging flood which all of this becomes, I am of no use to anyone. In order to extend a hand, drop a lifeline, or rescue anyone from it, I have to be up high on the bedrock and out of the torrent first. This means being mindful of my own triggers and fear responses and not engaging with them. This means surrendering to the spirit, to love, joy, peace, patience, trust, compassion, and so on. This means turning away from the dysfunctional human amygdala and training my own threat responses to stand down. This means asking the Spirit of Christ, asking Jesus Christ, to act and speak through me, to love all others through me, and to help me disengage from my flesh's responses. 

     The only thing I genuinely have control over, the only thing that is genuinely up to me is how I respond to anything. My own choices. It does no good to be swept away by the current of fear and anger. I can help no one if I myself am in need of rescue. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ means unlearning everything with which I was trained since I was little, and retraining and redisciplining myself to live as He taught, and walk as He walked. 

     The auther of that novelization of Episode III was more right than he realized. Even Jesus Himself taught us to not return evil for evil, to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, bless those who hunt us, and pray for those who abuse us. By doing anything from fear or aggression, we instantly, instinctively engage in the opposite of what He taught, and cease to be His disciples. By fighting at all, we lose that which is most important.

Rambling Thoughts About The State Of Theology

 I'm not entirely certain how to word what I'm thinking here, but I'm going to give it a go anyway.
     Theology, and in particular Christian theology, tends to be stuck in the past, and not in a good way. It boxes itself in with terms like Penal Substitutionary Atonement, Christus Victor, Trinitarianism, Arianism, Dualism, Gnosticism, Creationism, and several dozen other such terms born from medieval, renaissance, and pre-modern theological and philosophical works. These terms become shorthand for either orthodox or heterodox doctrinal statements depending on which side of them you might come down. Nearly all of the lenses through which the Scriptures or any interpretations of them are seen are built off of pre-industrial worldviews which no other science or field of knowledge uses any more. The irony here is that the most ancient texts of all, and the most ancient worldviews in which Christianity in particular was born and formed are totally ignored or explained away for anachronism. God forbid modern science and discoveries should have anything to contribute to the conversation.
     From my experience, the words of Yoda are never more true that, "You must unlearn what you have learned." The Scripture says that the word of God is living and active. There is a dynamism implied and even directly stated here. Our understanding of both general and special revelation and how one interprets and complements the other has to grow and evolve dynamically as our understanding of either grows and evolves dynamically with new information and evidence. That's how a science works. You make an observation, develop a hypothesis, test the hypothesis against observed reality, and then refine the hypothesis or develop a new one to explain the results and do it all over again.
     Theology used to be known as the queen of sciences and held in high esteem as such in universities. Now it's been ejected from the science departments of every university precisely because its practitioners refuse to accept new information which conflicts with their old hypotheses. They are like the old physicists who used to discourage people from entering the field because they thought there was nothing left to discover because of Newton. But then came Einstein. But then came Max Planck. Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics opened up completely new fields of study in physics, and we rely on their predictions for our modern technology, like cell phones for example, every day. The same is true of physicians who relied on Galen's medical texts for more than a thousand years and refused to accept any challenge to this brilliant man's canon until Galen was proven wrong by William Harvey's observations and new hypothesis of blood circulation. The Church's condemnation of Galileo is well documented, as is now the fact that the Earth and all the other planets revolve around the sun, and not vice versa.
     What amazes and dumbfounds me about all of this is that when these outdated interpretations are demonstrated to be lacking, it is treated as if the Scriptures themselves are being attacked as though the interpretation was just as sacred, just as God-breathed as the Scriptures themselves. People will literally refuse to accept what is right in front of their eyes. And why? Because it's "safe". It may be in error, but it's "safe". The interpretations and ideas about God themselves become sacred cows, idols to be adored and worshiped and protected at all cost, even the cost of being blind to the real, living God who actually is.
     Honestly, I'm getting to the point, or may have passed it a long, long time ago, where I just don't care anymore about the old theological categories and labels. The neat little boxes in which ideas can safely be placed in order to accept or more often reject them. Reality isn't neat. It's not safe. Neither is God where our worldviews are concerned. And there's a huge difference between holding beliefs and opinions about God and knowing Him, interacting with Him, and getting to know Him. There's a huge difference between theorizing about God and knowing Him by observation. You'd be surprised by how often the word in Greek, epignosis, "knowledge by observation," and its cognates are used in the New Testament when it comes to God and spiritual things, and how often this is encouraged and prayed for.
     Genuine theology, the study of God, doesn't exist in ancient tomes, terminology, and ideas. It exists by doing it. It exists by observation, hypothesis, and then testing that hypothesis against observed reality. We need to move on.

Comparing Epictetus with Paul

 "Are you in fact wanting what's possible and in particular what's possible for you? If so, why are you obstructed? Why are you discontented? Are you in fact avoiding what's unavoidable? If so, why do you encounter difficulties of any kind? Why do you meet with misfortune? Why do things that you want to happen not happen, while things you don't want to happen do happen? That's unmistakable evidence of a discontented and unhappy existence. 'I want something and it doesn't happen; am I not the most wretched creature in the world? I don't want something and it does happen: am I not the most wretched creature in the world?' ... 'in short, align what you want with what God wants. Who will impede you then? Who will constrain you? No one, any more than they could impede or constrain Zeus. When you have Zeus as your commander and align your wishes and desires with his, can you still be afraid of failing to get what you want? Give your desire and aversion over to poverty and wealth, and you'll fail to get what you desire and meet with what you want to avoid. Give them over to health, and you'll be miserable. Give them over to political power, honors, country, friends, children--in short, to anything that isn't subject to will--and the same goes. But give them over to Zeus and the gods--hand them over to them, put them in their charge, enroll them in their command--and how could you still be discontented?"
Epictetus, Discourses, Book 2, 17:17-18, 22c-25; Robin Waterfield, trans.

"Because I don't know what I'm achieving; because I'm not practicing what I want, but I'm doing this thing I hate. And if I don't want this thing I'm doing, I'm in agreement with the rule that it's good. But now I am no longer achieving it but the error residing within me. Because I know that within me doesn't reside, that is, within my flesh, good; because the willing is there in me, but the achieving the good is not; because I'm not doing the good I want, but I'm practicing this bad thing I don't want. And if I'm doing this thing I don't want, I'm no longer achieving it but the malfunction residing within me. I'm then finding the rule, for me who is willing to do the good, that the bad is there in me; because I am rejoicing together with the rule of the God in line with the internal person, yet I'm looking at a different rule among my body parts soldiering against the rule of my intellect and capturing me with the rule of the malfunction which exists within my body parts. I am a miserable human being; who will rescue me from this body of death? But charity to the God through Yeshua the Anointed our Lord. Therefore then I myself am in fact enslaved by the intellect to the divine rule, yet by the flesh to the rule of the malfunction. Nothing therefore is now a condemnation against those within the Anointed Yeshua not walking in line with the flesh, but in line with the Pneuma."
Romans 7:15-8:1

I Am Not My Disability or Difference

 A little while ago, I unintentionally got into a discussion on Facebook which went downhill almost immediately and in a way I hadn't expected.  I'm no stranger to arguments or difficult conversations, but this one really took me by surprise. It was my first introduction to what appears to be a subculture of neurodivergent folks, such as myself, who so identify with their neurodivergence that to suggest any kind of a treatment which might assist in normalizing the brain is considered horrendous and akin to being a Nazi (I myself was accused of advocating for the extermination of autistic people, something which anyone who knows me and my history knows is absurd).

     This came up in a conversation I was having with Phoenix earlier tonight, and what stuck in my mind is how one's difference or disability becomes such a part of their self-identity that they can't even consider parting with it. And this becomes true regardless of what thing you are self-identifying with.

     Here's the thing though, you are not your disability. You are not your thoughts. You are not your trauma. I tend to self-identify with being pretty proficient with Koine Greek, but I am not my proficiency with Greek. I tend to self-identify with being part native American as well as being thirteenth generation American, but I am not my ancestry. I am not even my own personal history or experiences. As much as I love and appreciate my relationships with the people around me, I am not those relationships. I am not my possessions either. I am not my personal likes or dislikes. I am not what I know or don't know. All of these things are acquired during this life in some way and at some time, but they will all leave once this life ends and all that will remain is this consciousness. The memories of each thing might continue, baked into the experiences of that consciousness, but they are not that consciousness.

     So what am I if I am none of these things? What are you if you are none of the things you self-identify with? At the very foundation, you are logos and a part of the Logos. You are being, and share in the existence of the Being. You are a member, a body part, of the Logos with Him as the head to which you are connected as a single body. Everything else you cling to, everything else I cling to as my self-identity will drop away once this brain stops functioning because, when all is said and done, I am none of those things.

     And to this I would add as well that you are not your error. You are not your malfunction. You are not your hamartia because you are not your body. You are not your brain. You inhabit a body. You have a hamartia disorder in this life because you inhabit a human body and possess a human brain. But you yourself are not inherently erroneous. You yourself are logos and part of the Logos. You yourself are the image of God.

      The conditions of discipleship which Jesus laid down were to let go of any relationships, any possessions, any self-identity to which you are clinging so that you could focus on remaining aware of and attached to the Head, which of course was Him as the Logos and the source of who you really are, that is, the image of God. As Jesus Himself said, speaking as the Logos, "Remain in Me and I in you ... without Me you can't do anything at all."

The Authenticity of Paul

 Recently, I've seen several folks online arguing that Paul didn't even exist and that his letters were a fourth century fraud. For some reason, this absurdity keeps making the rounds and there are far too many people who buy into it. The latest person I encountered suggested that they could have been written as late as the seventh century because Koine Greek extended between the second century BCE to the seventh century BCE. The constant error behind this is that those who make this claim don't understand the language in which they were written, or how language changes over time. Five hundred years give or take is generally when two stages of a language become mutually unintelligible, though it becomes a lot tougher around four hundred. I thought I'd post my response to this here:
     "Seventh century CE is pushing it. A lot. Seventh century Greek would be unintelligible to a first century speaker and would at the least be very, very different. The Greek of the New Testament is definitely what was spoken between the first and second centuries. You can tell this by comparing it with other first century and early second century writings in the Koine such as Epictetus and the Early Church Patristics like the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and others. You have to take language change into account, even within the same language. To say that the New Testament could have been written in the fourth century, much less the seventh, doesn't take into account the change in the language over time, as well as regional accents and dialects. It's like saying Chaucer could have been written in the 1900s because English has technically been spoken since the 900s or even earlier. I would draw your attention to the Book of Mormon as an illustration of an obvious linguistic forgery. It attempts greatly to mimic the language of the King James Version, but any honest comparison of the two would conclude that the author of the former doesn't actually know how to wield the Elizabethan form of the language and it comes off as completely erroneous. The only way anyone can conclude that the New Testament was not written in the first century is if they had never actually read it in the original Greek and had never compared any other Greek texts from various periods and regions either. I have. I assure you, they are very different. I've been doing it for thirty years. The writings of Paul are first century and all written or dictated by the same person."
     To add to this, I would put forth as an example the original Greek form of the Philokalia. This is the second most important book of the Eastern Orthodox Church and is a series of mystical and theological essays and spiritual reflections written in Greek over a period between the fifth century CE and the fifteenth century CE by multiple religious and monastics across the Orthodox spectrum. The Greek in which it was written is diverse from beginning to end as it moves from late Koine into Byzantine and the proto form of what is now Modern Greek.
     My point to all of this is that you can tell what period a text was written in simply by comparing the form of the language to other texts in the same way they you can tell what period an English text was written in whether it was Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan, eighteenth century, or present day twenty-first century English. You can also tell from what region the speaker or writer came from by the idioms, spellings, and choices of vocabulary. It's not hard to distinguish J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. It's also not hard to distinguish Jane Eyre from the original text of Beowulf. Even C.S. Lewis's writing style can be distinguished from J.R.R. Tolkien's, and they were contemporaries, friends, and colleagues in roughly the same socio-linguistic landscape!
     Paul's writing is distinct from all the other New Testament authors, but it is clearly written by a single author who lived in the first century, was clearly educated in the Greek classics and Roman Stoic worldview as well as of a distinctly first century Jewish education and identity. Everything from the internal evidence of his letters pinpoints the mid-first century and largely the eastern Mediterranean. Could they have been faked at a much later date? Honestly, I can't see how. These letters were known by the Patristic Fathers and mentioned by them as far back as the late first century, as was Paul. No one in the first three centuries of Christianity ever actually questioned their authenticity. There were a number of writings which were questioned, even within the canon N.T., but Paul's never actually were, and they were among the earliest to be translated to Aramaic in the second century if memory serves at all.
     Finally, Paul's letters are personal from beginning to end, and they're personal in a way that strikes of authenticity. One would have to be a very talented novelist to be able to express this much authentic emotion through the words of the original first century Greek. They would have had to not only fake Paul's letters, but most of the book of Acts in which Paul's story was told, and as such, the Gospel of Luke as well which is written in the exact same style, dialect, and accent as Acts. They would also have had to really had down Paul's movements and the first century historical figures mentioned in them to such an extent as to be able to authentically write and keep track of where he was writing from and the events surrounding the period in which he was writing. This would have been a massive scholarly undertaking considering it would have had to be written in at least two different styles and dialects of the language which no longer existed by the fourth century, much less the fifth. Honestly, it takes less faith to believe these writings are exactly what they purport to be as the preponderance of internal evidence is just rabidly against their being a fraud.
     Whether one agrees with St. Paul or not, whether they understand what he was really writing and saying, there is really just no other conclusion that can be drawn except they they were written when they say they were, by whom they say they were, and to whom they say they were. Any suggestion otherwise just betrays an utter ignorance of the language, the time period, and every other factor involved all for the sake of ignoring what the reader perceives to be what Paul meant.

Because It's Israel

 It has now been reported that Netanyahu's government has approved a plan to not only permanently occupy Gaza, but forcibly relocate its residents south. Over 50,000 Palestinians, men, women, and children have been killed since the October 7th massacre, and 118,000 have been injured. Hospitals have been raided and bombed. Schools have been destroyed. All aid supplies into Gaza have been cut off by the Israeli defense force. People are literally starving to death, and Gaza now resembles a landscape worse than something out of the Fallout games.
     The most chilling fact? Far too many professing "Christians" are cheering it on. Why? Because the government of Israel is the perpetrator. What are considered multiple atrocities if committed by any other nation are seen as Biblically mandated by these people because it is Israel and it is the Palestinians. It is because of things that occurred 3500 years ago with a very different nation of Israel and a very different, pagan, child-sacrificing Canaanite population. It has nothing to do with the virtues or lack thereof of the Palestinian people. Yes, Hamas committed atrocities, and is a terrorist group, but not every Palestinian in Gaza was Hamas. Most weren't. Most were just people trying to live their lives, work, go to school, raise their families, even try to make the world better in their own way.
     When is it considered an atrocity? When is it considered wrong? Regardless of Israel's ancestral claims on this strip of land along the Mediterranean coastline, regardless of what happened on October 7th, when does the intentional slaughter and forced relocation of civilians, a great many of whom are children, become an atrocity even if Israel is the nation doing it? How high do the numbers have to go? Or do they get a carte blanche no matter what they do to them because they're Israel?
     The Palestinians are not the Canaanites. The Canaanites were all gone by the time Judah went into captivity. They didn't exist by the first century. The Palestinians are descendants of various groups that have lived in and around the Levant for thousands of years. They represent not only Muslims, but also a good many Christians from some of the oldest Churches in the world. There was no command in the Torah to wipe out the Palestinians, the majority of whom are also descendants of Abraham, one way or the other. God commanded Israel to spare his brother Esau's nation, Edom, and the descendants of Ishmael were always considered distant family to them as well. By committing these atrocities against the Palestinians, Israel is committing these atrocities against their own relations in the family of Abraham, and disobeying the Torah of God egregiously.
     Does anyone seriously think God will be pleased with them over this?

A Ramble About Death and Passing On

 A brother I knew from Cursillo just passed away today. He was an older man, a Vietnam veteran, but still, it was sudden and unexpected. Looking back, I feel like I've seen almost too many people I've known pass away. Death really hasn't been a stranger. One day they're there and talking to you, and the next they're not, and it makes me remember how short this life can be every time. All of my grandparents, my dad, my nephew, my sister, classmates from college, a professor who died while I was in attendance, people I served as a minister, people who had become close. I feel like I've seen far too many open caskets, and heard about far too many more.
     I've made no secret about my found belief in the passing of one's consciousness from one's life to the next, or my belief in a final resurrection. I see no contradiction between the two. There are parts in the Gospels where Jesus and His disciples assume this possibility, and the idea of a kind of reincarnation in the western world dates back to Pythagoras, though is really expounded on by Plato. The possibility was just as much a part of the Hellenistic understanding of death as was Hades, Elysium, and Tartarus. From the studies done of kids who remember their past lives up to about five or six years old, to the many, many testimonies of NDEers, and of course the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, it's clear to me that one's soul, or consciousness, is not tied to the body and does not cease to exist when the body shuts down and dies. This is what the evidence which I've studied and read has led me to.
     What is often quoted here in rebuttal to the view I've come to hold is the verse in Hebrews which says, "For it is appointed for a human being to die once, and after this the judgment." After all of my study and ruminations on the subject, I've come to understand that there is more than one way to understand this verse. The question which must be asked is, "What comprises a human being, or 'anthropos' in the original Greek?" Is it the consciousness of the person alone? Or is it the consciousness and the body?" Is each separate human life which the consciousness inhabits an individual human being with their own experiences, thoughts, memories, and so on? If so, than this concept that an individual human being can only die once can and does coexist with the consciousness living multiple lifetimes inhabiting different bodies and assuming different personas.
     I've described it before as a person creating an avatar in a massively multiplayer online role playing game. They play that character up until the character dies, and then a new one is created. Each time, there's an amnesia which takes place so that the new person is unaware and unconscious (most of the time; with the exception of those aforementioned kids) of any of the previous "player characters" before them. One character might be a rogue and a scoundrel, another might be a saint or a paladin. One might be a man, another might be a woman as the consciousness, the "player" itself, knows no physical gender. There will always be some hints, some unconscious tells, some choices which the player simply will or will not make regardless of which character they're playing, but otherwise, each character is a separate individual.
     This understanding brings both comfort and a sense of tragedy to me. On the one hand, no one is ever truly lost, as the consciousness itself is immortal and eternal in nature. On the other, each combination of consciousness and body into a unique human being is in itself special and worth knowing with their own stories, their own memories, and their own triumphs and tragedies. These individual characters live on only in our memories while the consciousness behind them moves on to a new avatar and a new experience.
     All those people, all those characters whom I have known for whom the game has ended, were worth knowing. Their stories meant something, and each one was intriguing. Some were tragic, others were triumphant, and still more were both. Even as the consciousness of my friend from Cursillo has moved on from the character it was playing, I wish I had known more of the story of that character and the life he led.
     At some point, I will move on as well from this body and this character's story, and that's okay. When that happens, I hope my story inspired and entertained and gave people pause to think and reflect. That is, as I understand it, the point.

To Be A Christian - Part 2

 Being a Christian has very little to do with what happens in the afterlife, and everything to do with what happens in the here and now. Being a Christian has nothing to do with going to heaven when you die, but everything to do with experiencing heaven and bringing heaven down for others to experience in this life. The goal of being a Christian is not passing through the pearly gates after death, but full submission to the Spirit of Christ so that when others see and hear you, they see and hear Christ. The deliverance, the salvation brought about by being a Christian is about deliverance from one's own malfunctioning flesh and its behaviors, not deliverance from judgment in the afterlife. Being a Christian has little if anything to do with what you profess to believe, and everything to do with how you live in the world, and from what source of behavior you operate.
     If we take Jesus at His word, no one will be tested on their theology, but everyone will be judged on whether or not they treated others with loving kindness and compassion. The only rule which God cares about us following is the rule of love for one another and for Him. Literally nothing else matters, and when we love we experience God and others experience God through us. It literally makes no difference how correct or how orthodox or heterodox your theology is. But it makes every difference whether or not you are compassionate and care about the person next to you as yourself. Remember, what you dish out will be dished back to you, and with what standard you use to judge, you yourself will be judged using the same standard. Whatever a person plants he or she will also harvest.
     As Paul also wrote, without love, I am nothing, I gain nothing. Why? Because God is love, as John wrote, and God is the goal. The person who claims to be a Christian, a disciple of Jesus Christ, and does not love, does not care about the person next to them, or has no compassion or empathy for their neighbors is a liar. They are lying to themselves, to others, and to God. They may have the facade of a religious person, but they are, as Jesus expressed, "whitewashed tombs." Pretty on the outside, but inside full of death and decay.
     Professed belief is worthless without the behaviors which go along with that professed belief. Your actions and how you live your life will always betray what you actually believe, no matter what you profess. Love for one another, for the person next to you, and the love of God within and through you is the evidence of one's actual discipleship and belief. Without love, what you say or profess is worth nothing, and you cannot hide this from the God who sees everything you see, feels everything you feel, and knows your mind better than you do.

To Be A Christian

 What does it mean to be a Christian? I've asked this question many times, and I think it needs to continue to be asked because we need to understand what the answer really is as it was originally meant. To be a Christian was to devote oneself to being a disciple of Jesus Christ. It meant that you were devoting yourself to living as Jesus Christ taught, and walking as He walked. To operate as He operated throughout His entire life.
    The Christians of the first and second centuries taught that if anyone is found not living as Jesus Christ taught, then they were not a Christian even if they professed with their lips what He taught. Even Paul was explicit when he told the Corinthians to expel the man sleeping with his father's wife, and to not associate with anyone who named himself a brother (in Christ) who operated from the responses of his malfunctioning flesh (Paul used the examples of whoring, avariciousness. idolatry, alcoholic, and so on). Both Jesus and Paul taught that if a brother had fallen into error, then another brother was to go to them and gently correct them. If the brother refused to be corrected, then they were to take one or two more for an intervention. If the brother still wouldn't be corrected, then they were to expel the person from their congregation. In the book of Acts, when Simon Magus, who had been baptized by Philip, offered money to Peter in order to be able to give someone the Holy Spirit, Peter rebuked and completely disowned him as a Christian regardless of his baptism. John was explicit in his first epistle that anyone who claims to make their home in Him is obligated to walk as He walked.
     Trying to follow the law of Moses, the ten commandments, adhere to six-day creationism, being anti-abortion, belonging to a particular political party, or supporting a particular secular leader do not make one a Christian. Going to church, praying a prayer, tithing, going to Bible school, becoming a pastor, preaching, or believing particular theologies do not make one a Christian. According to the ancient Christians themselves, what makes someone a Christian is devoting themselves to live as Jesus taught and walking as He walked. Period. Baptism was the initiation of one's discipleship, but it was not the end. To be a disciple meant, literally, to make one's home in Jesus Christ and to stay there, turning around and returning if you were found wandering off.
     Disciples of Jesus Christ are best when they are in community with others who are also genuine disciples and have the same goal of staying put in Jesus Christ. This being said, discipleship is, first and foremost, a personal choice and commitment. No one can do it for you. You are either in submission to the Spirit of Christ, or you are not. No one can be in submission to Him for you. It doesn't work that way. No one can walk as He walked for you. You are personally responsible to watch yourself as to whether or not you are operating from your own malfunctioning flesh or from the Spirit of Christ. A disciple of Jesus Christ must be a functioning disciple solo before they can really be a functioning disciple in community.
     If a person is not going to bother making their home in Him and staying put there, they shouldn't bother calling themselves a Christian. If a person is going to continue to operate from their own malfunctioning flesh without correction, then they shouldn't speak evil of Jesus Christ by calling themselves a follower of His. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ means representing Him and being Him for others around you.

A Ramble About Climate and Farming

 My wife and I went to get more hay yesterday from a farmer not too far away. As we were loading the hay, we were chatting. As it turned out, this farmer was the former sheriff of Ohio County, and he was in office during the huge tornado that hit here just a few years ago shortly after we arrived. What stuck in my mind about that conversation was how he was talking about one or more of his neighbors not being able to plant that season after that. It's the case this year too. We dodged local tornadoes but many of the fields are still flooded even weeks after the latest "1000 year storm" blew through. The window for getting the crops in on time is closing. It's a distinctly rural America problem, but it doesn't just impact the farmers here. In fact, the more I thought about it, things like this are absolutely devastating for everyone. Let me explain.
     What is the absolute foundation of human civilization? Farming. To urban ears, that might sound ridiculous, but it is and has always been farming for thousands of years. Human beings didn't stop being hunter-gathers and settle down into population centers and settlements until they started intentionally planting crops and keeping livestock. Ancient cities couldn't exist without the food production to support them, and neither can modern cities.
     To support a city area like Southern California, for example, which boasts a population of fifteen million people give or take, you need an obscene amount of food production, almost none of which is really local to places like Los Angeles, Orange County, or San Diego (yes California is a huge agricultural state, but it focuses more on luxury or specialty crops). Almost all of the staple foods like wheat, rice, corn, and so on are imported, and this is true of New York, Chicago, and all of the major cities in the United States and around the world. Most of it is produced elsewhere, either in more rural states such as Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Kentucky, and so on, or it is produced overseas in places like China, Thailand, and India in the case of rice.
      The most important thing needed in farming is a stable, predictable climate. One of the things I've noticed being here in Kentucky is the weeds. What's interesting about them is that you don't always get the same kinds of weeds every year in the same quantities. Why? Because of variations in the climate and weather patterns. How hot it gets and how early, how much or how little rain we get and when, or how late the freezes go impact which weeds we get. Plants will only grow when the conditions are favorable for them to grow, and every plant has its own particular conditions for growth, be it a weed or a crop. The only reason farming is possible is because the farmer can trust that he or she's going to be able to predict with a reasonable amount of accuracy when to plant, how hot or how cold it's going to be, and how much rain the ground's going to get. If the farmer can't be certain of any of that, it's a complete crap shoot. More and more over the last several years, farming has been becoming like taking your money to Vegas and seeing what happens.
     There have been too many years recently where the climate has completely turned against the farmers with flooded fields or crops scorched by summer sun so hot that they wither and die in the fields. This isn't a problem even confined to the United States as the increasingly unstable climate worldwide has impacted basic food crop production. And this doesn't just impact the price of, say bread or rice. It impacts the price of meat too as it becomes more expensive to keep livestock fed when grain supplies get squeezed.
     Climate-wise, there've been several indications now that we've passed the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold for warming, and this is the cause for all of the unstable weather which has been impacting the farms. We've passed it, and we're still getting warmer. We get warmer, the weather patterns become even more unstable. When the weather patterns become more unstable they can't be predicted. When you can't predict the weather, you can't farm reliably. When you can't farm reliably, you can't have large human settlements or populations centers.
     In the Book of Revelation, it talks about one of the seals being famine, and a very small amount of wheat (maybe enough for a loaf of bread) being sold for about a day's wages (a denarius in the text). This is already the reality in more parts of the world than people in the United States realize. As the weather becomes impossible to reliably farm with, it will become the reality here too, and when that happens, civilization will fall because its very foundation will have been pulled out from underneath it.

The Linguistic Noise Inherent in Modern Bible Translations

 What a lot of people don't realize about Bible translation, and specifically the translation into English is how much linguistic "noise" there actually is between the source and the target languages. Let's just take the New Testament for a moment. The New Testament was originally written in the colloquial Greek of the first century Eastern Mediterranean. The dialogue and teachings of Jesus that it records however were likely originally spoken in Aramaic (Classical Syriac, not the Biblical Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra), at least most of the time, and as such there are a number of Aramaicisms in the text which were translated directly by four different authors into the more widely spoken Greek.
      In the fifth century, the Greek text was translated into colloquial (or "vulgar") Latin. Think about the amount of linguistic change which occurred just between the first and fifth centuries when Jerome translated the texts. That's about 4-500 years worth of change. To put that into perspective, that's the difference between Anglo-Saxon (think the original Beowulf poem) and Elizabethan English (think Shakespeare and the KJV). The latter is still mutually intelligible with Modern English, the former is not and must be learned as a foreign language. So when Jerome translated it into the Latin of the fifth century, he translated first century Greek with a fifth century Greek understanding of the words and syntax, and both changed over that period of time.
     The Latin text, the Vulgate, was the de facto standard text of the New Testament for the Western Church and Western Scholarship for about a thousand years, and long past the time when Latin was the colloquial language of anyone. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it had morphed into what we now know as the Romance languages and their respective dialects (much as Anglo-Saxon morphed into Elizabethan). Latin as such only remained spoken as, essentially, an artificial language used for education and ecclesiastical liturgy. It was no one's birth language. While it was artificially maintained, the meanings of the Latin words continued to shift and change over that thousand year period. The artificial Latin spoken in Martin Luther's day would have been barely intelligible if at all to Jerome in the fifth century.
     When John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other early translators and Reformers first read the New Testament, they read it in this artificially maintained Latin, not their own native tongues, and not in the Original Greek. The Greek texts themselves had been maintained by the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church, but were largely unknown in the Western Roman Catholic Church until after 1451 CE when the Byzantine capital of Constantinople fell to the Turks and a large number of Greek scholars and clergy fled with their manuscripts west to Rome, and other European capitals. Those who came spoke Greek, but a Greek which, like the other languages, had morphed over the fifteen hundred year time span since the original texts were written, and was mutually unintelligible with the Greek of the New Testament. Furthermore, there was no one unified text of the Greek New Testament until Erasmus compiled his Textus Receptus from Eastern Orthodox Lectionaries and other manuscripts. Ironically, he only did this so he could place it side by side with the Latin to prove the superiority of the Latin text over the original Greek!
     This is the linguistic context of Luther's German translation from the original languages, as well as Tyndale's English, and Calvin's French translations. They all may have been excellent scholars, but in many if not most cases their translations relied heavily on the meaning of the Latin text as they understood it in the sixteenth century even if they were trying to translate it from the Greek because they simply did not have the tools at their disposal to achieve enough of a fluency in first century colloquial Greek laced with Aramaicisms in half the text.
     Modern translations of the New Testament often still rely heavily on the work of these men. Virtually all modern translations into English rely on Tyndale's understanding of what the text was saying, even if they don't copy his words directly, they often paraphrase them. Probably a good 75% of the King James Version of the New Testament is plagiarized directly from Tyndale, and most follow suit to a greater or lesser degree because few translators want to deviate from what has already been done, even if modern translation tools tell a different story. Put simply, the New Testament which is read today in English has 2,000 years worth of linguistic, cultural, and theological noise which makes it difficult to understand what the original authors were trying to say to their own target audiences who knew the language, culture, and worldview because they shared it.

A Ramble About Empty Temples

 Something which occurred to me tonight. There could be no Day of Atonement sacrifice without the Ark of the Covenant, and specifically the hilasterion, or "Mercy Seat", according to the Torah. The Ark of the Covenant hadn't been returned to the temple after the Babylonian exile. No one actually knows what happened to it. It wasn't present in the restored temple, much less Herod's temple in the first century. Therefore, the priests in the temple were committing fraud to begin with, and they knew it.
     They were going through the motions, but the throne of God, the literal presence of God within the temple, the Shekinah between the cherubim had departed and had not returned. There was no mercy seat for them to sprinkle the blood on for at least five hundred years by the time of Jesus in the first century. It was the religious facade of a people who had broken their contract so many times that the other, Divine party had literally left and not come back (something which Ezekiel actually details, and which Jeremiah goes into as well). He simply wasn't present within Herod's temple, not until Jesus set foot in it at the age of twelve.
     This doesn't mean that there weren't faithful individuals among the Judean people, and those who sought to keep the spirit of the Torah as much as the letter. But the temple religious sacrifices were empty, and couldn't actually be physically completed according to what Moses wrote. Herod's temple was a glittering magnificent empty fraud, and it was torn down stone by stone as a result.
     In a way, there is a parallel here with modern Christianity. People go to church, partake of the ordinances or sacraments, listen to the sermons, and go through the motions of ritual worship, but how many encounter and experience Jesus Christ in their houses of worship? How many are taught to let go and let Him act and speak through them? Within how many can the presence of Jesus Christ, and through Him the God and Father, be felt and observed? How many "Christians" are glittering, magnificent, yet empty temples? How many abandon the terms of the New Contract to "make your home within Me and I within you"? How many abandon His commands to "love one another as I have loved you" in favor of "orthodox theology"? How many celebrate their Christianity with songs, tee-shirts, magnificent church buildings, and other paraphernalia, yet do so without living as He taught, walking as He walked, or even knowing what it is to experience His living presence within them?
     To him who has not, even what little they think they have will be taken away, and not one stone will remain upon another.

That Saturday...

      From the time he was arrested to the time they saw Him standing there again, it was pure terror. Most of them were hiding in the house for fear of being arrested, but also because they themselves were the only other people they could turn to. There were a little over a hundred of them that made it back and stayed there from the Thursday night to the Sunday morning. They didn't see John, Mary His mother, Mary Magdalene, or a few others until just close to sundown on that Friday. Thomas had disappeared completely, as had a few others. They only heard bits and pieces of the details of what was happening when it was happening which were relayed back to them through mostly children who were able to pass through the crowds without fear of arrest. No one in the crowds paid any attention to them as they came and went.
     It is hard to adequately express what they were going through that Saturday. The men, the women, and the children who were behind the walls of the house. There was fear in abundance, there was shame, there was guilt, and there was a deep, deep depression and despair which was evident in their expressions and in their eyes.
     They all knew what He had taught them, and He had lived what He taught when the soldiers came for him. He didn't return evil for evil, just as He taught. When Peter tried to use a sword to defend Him, He put a stop to it and mended the damage done. From what they had been told, even on the cross, He forgave those murdering Him. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who hunt you, and pray for those who abuse you." This is what He taught, and this is what He did even as He was bleeding out and suffocating. It was a powerful final lesson for them, and it weighed on each one of them, especially John who had been there to see and hear everything. His eyes were haunted and his entire disposition traumatized by what he experienced in the death of his best friend and son of his mother's sister. Each one of them had to keep living, but that Saturday they just didn't know how. None of them.
     The crucifixion happened. It happened to real people in real history. It affected and traumatized real people who had even been told it was going to happen, but were still in shock when it did. In the same way, the resurrection happened, and so many people saw Him raised from the dead that it almost became the first century "Elvis sightings" phenomenon in the Eastern Mediterranean. Kayafa and Khannah had to work hard to suppress the truth of what too many people had seen with their own eyes. Jesus wasn't selective about who saw Him risen. He didn't hide it and had no intentions to. The lies and slander they spread about Him even made its way into the Talmud as they sent out agents to stop those who saw Him alive from saying anything further. One such agent had been Saul of Tarsus... that is, until he saw Him too.
     There is so much evidence, circumstantial and even direct, of both the crucifixion and resurrection that it's honestly ridiculous and absurd when people call it or even Him a myth and doubt His existence at all. Usually the reasons have nothing to do with evidence, but because they are angry, and often rightly so, with those who claim to represent Him and the religion that came to be.
      But He was very real. He was like everyone's favorite brother, and when He talked to you, you felt like the only one there. You could tell Him anything, and He would understand. He Himself wasn't always in the best of health, but He healed everyone who came to Him. He owned nothing, yet the whole world lent itself to His use. He Himself couldn't read or write, yet His knowledge and wisdom were absolute. There wasn't a person who came into His view that He did not care about, and you could tell. There wasn't a person with whom He interacted that He did not love, even those who tried to trap Him, even those who were murdering Him. When He rebuked, you could hear the pleading for those He was rebuking in His voice. When He became angry with someone, it was as an older brother angry at their younger sibling for doing something that could hurt themselves or others. It was always corrective, but never vengeful.
     April 4th, 0033CE was a hard, hard day for those in that house. Some could barely process what was happening. For others, the shock of His loss so overtook them they didn't notice when the sun rose or set. They wouldn't again until throughout the day of April 5th.

The RPG of Life and the Choices We Make

 Yesterday, I shot and killed my son with an automatic laser pistol. Before you call the police on me, let me explain.
     I was playing the RPG "Fallout 4" on my computer. This is a PC Role Playing Game where you take on the persona of a former military veteran who was cryogenically frozen for two hundred years and then woke up to find a post-nuclear holocaust world. Right before he wakes up and the game really begins, he has to wake up and watch his wife be murdered and his son kidnapped before he's frozen again. This leads to the main questline of the game which is avenging his wife and rescuing his son, Shaun.
     What you don't know at the beginning of the game is that Shaun's kidnapping (and his wife's murder) occurred sixty years before your character actually escapes the underground vault where he was frozen. In that time period, Shaun was raised in a safe, relatively loving and caring environment where he grew up to be a respected scientist and eventually became the director of that facility, the Institute. The Institute in the year 2287 is deep underground beneath the ruins of the "Commonwealth Institute of Technology" and has been doing unethical experiments and occasionally replacing people with "synths," artificial human beings which can be shut down or reprogrammed at their whim, robbing them of their free will. The Institute is the main antagonist faction in the game, and while you can choose to side with them, the game strongly leads you to see them as the bad guy. Which brings me back to my aforementioned murder.
       I had hoped to do this playthrough without killing Shaun. I was looking to achieve an endgame result in favor of a more freedom loving faction, the game's rather weak but well intentioned "good guys," the Minutemen. I had intended to visit the Institute, do the requisite quest, get into an argument with the now sixty year old Shaun (physically at least thirty years older than my character), and be banished from the Institute without committing (technical) infanticide. But, the game simply wouldn't let me. No matter what response I gave, Shaun just kept rolling with it and keeping me around. So, I went with it until I got stuck. The quests just wouldn't progress, and it was going to force me to choose. It was either Shaun or the freedom of everyone else in the Commonwealth. In this playthrough, I chose the Commonwealth over my son and ended his life. For the record, it's revealed in the game that he's dying of cancer regardless. Also for the record, I sided with the Institute on my first playthrough, so I know how that one ends as well. After I ended Shaun before the cancer could, the game unstuck itself and I was able to continue the main questline.
     It got me thinking though. It's not the first time I've had to make an unsavory choice in a game. Skyrim has a number of less than savory choices in order to finish a quest or achieve something. I literally committed cold blooded murder in that game on my first playthrough a couple of times because, like with Shaun, I couldn't see a way around it. That is, I couldn't see a way around it until my next playthrough where I was able to either talk my way around it, or do something else to achieve the same result. Choices have in-game consequences which affect how the story progresses and how others in the game see your character. Trust me, it's no fun to immediately have guards try to arrest or kill you the minute you set foot in a certain province because you made a bad choice.
     Don't get me wrong, I don't play these games as a "murder hobo." I genuinely try to make the best choices possible where the most people benefit and hopefully the least amount of people die. My favorite part of Fallout 4 is genuinely helping people try and rebuild their communities and through rebuilding them also rebuilding the Commonwealth and making it a thriving, just society again. In Skyrim, those murders were committed, literally, with the best of intentions in order to either help a bunch of kids at an orphanage or prevent a really bad demonic entity from doing even worse things. I just didn't know at the time how to avoid them.
     The reality we live in is, in many respects, a lot like these RPGs. Who and what we are is a consciousness, a soul, temporarily inhabiting a physical body. What happens in this reality cannot actually harm what we actually are, the real "us" as it were, any more than what happens to my character in Fallout 4 can genuinely harm me as I sit at the computer and play it. The only thing that is "real," the only thing that truly belongs to me in this life are my responses and the choices I make. The same of true of the RPG. While nothing that happens in it is "real," nevertheless the choices I make are still mine. The responses are still mine. I can own nothing else, either in this life, or in the RPG. When I shut down the game, I take the memories and lessons of those choices with me and nothing else. When my consciousness finally leaves this body behind, I do the same. When I start the game up again with a new character, I bring those memories and lessons with me to apply to a new playthrough where I can potentially make different if not better choices and responses to produce a better outcome. If the testimonies of many people, both Near Death Experiencers and those who remember bits and pieces of their past lives (kids especially), are to be believed then I can potentially do the same upon my next "character" and "playthrough" of this life (albeit with the post-birth amnesia to a greater or lesser degree). In Fallout 4, there's really no right or wrong way to play the game. The same is true of Skyrim and nearly every other RPG. There are consequences for your choices and they can be either beneficial or harmful. The same is true of this life. We make beneficial choices and we make harmful choices and, regardless of the outcome, we learn from both what works best for everyone and what doesn't. What allows us to make real progress, and what leaves us stuck.
     We learn and we grow by the experiences we have, and no experience is wasted if we are able to put it to use in making more progress, even if it's a "don't do that again" experience. This is how wisdom is built up and accumulated over time, and potentially over many lifetimes.
     One of these days, I'm going to figure out how to unlock the ending where neither the Institute wins nor do I have to kill my son who is much older than I am. I just didn't manage it this playthrough. The same is true of this life.

The United States, Rome, Caesar, Trump, and How to Live in All of It.

      I haven't posted here for a little while lately. I’ve spent a lot of emotional turmoil lately over what’s been rapidly happening to the United States. My family’s roots go deep here, all the way back to the original colonies through a couple of lines, and back farther than that through another. As I’ve said on more than one occasion, I’m about as “ethnically American” as it gets. There is no other place my family has called home since at least the Boston Bay Colony. This is and has been my ancestral homeland for close to four hundred years, and what happens to it affects me deeply. Lately, I can’t turn on a news broadcast or look at my news feed online without my heart sinking and at times breaking for what is happening to this nation that my ancestors helped build, fought for, bled for, and died for. I had ancestors in the American Revolution, both sides of the Civil War, a grand uncle who died as a soldier in WWI, a grandfather who died testing military aircraft at the end of WWII, a step-grandfather who was in the merchant marines, a father who spent twenty years in the U.S. Army retiring as a CWO3, and now a son, of whom I am immensely proud, serving in the U.S. Navy. I grew up until the age of six on or near military bases, and was taught to love flag, constitution, and country from the time I could walk. It was only asthma that kept me out of the service, twice. I was taught to respect the military as well as police officers (both parents went through police academy), to be proud of my heritage and our country’s history. And my heart is breaking at the utter betrayal of that heritage and history, and I can do nothing about it.
     There can be no doubt, at least in my mind, that the United States that we knew, that I was taught to know, is over. It has been and is being systematically dismantled by selfish and self-serving men and women, and possibly in service to a hostile foreign power. Those now sitting in the halls of power care nothing for any of this except for what benefits them or appears to benefit them. They care only for what is politically expedient at the moment. The situation in the U.S. Capital resembles the machinations of the senators and politicians of another, more ancient civilization and empire: Rome.
      One thing which keeps coming to my mind about ancient Rome is that, even after it transitioned from a nominally democratic republic to a dictatorship ruled by emperors, life went on. Even after Julius Caesar’s ambitious betrayal of those republican ideals and Roman law as he took the title of dictator for life, life for the people went on largely as it had. From Julius Caesar to Caesar Augustus, and from Augustus to Tiberius to Claudius to Nero, life went on. Corruption in the government was rampant even as the more noble and honorable of Rome’s leaders tried to hold everything together, sometimes succeeding for a while, and sometimes failing spectacularly. There were wealthy people, there were poor people. There were slaves, and there were slave owners. Industries and businesses continued to operate or not. People continued to travel, or not. Life went on and people did the best they could with what life had thrown at them. Sometimes there was justice to be found in the courts, sometimes there wasn’t. Philosophers and preachers taught the people openly regardless, and frequently preached against that very corruption, accepting the consequences when they ran afoul of powerful people. Epictetus has a good deal to say about this very subject as he and the other Stoic philosophers were exiled from Rome at one point because their teachings contradicted the actions and immorality of the emperor at the time.
      Among the Christians, there were no revolutionaries, and certainly no violent revolutionaries. Not once in the writings of the New Testament will you find anyone actually critical of the Roman authorities, especially Jesus Himself. The Judean authorities, yes. The Roman authorities, no. Paul is clear that respect, honor, and taxes were all to be paid to whomever they were due, and in Acts we see him even being friends with high ranking Roman officials in Ephesus. Decades later, Polycarp, when the Roman authorities came to arrest him, ordered his own people to set out a table with as much food and drink as those officers wanted. What he could not do was declare that “Caesar is Lord,” and accepting the consequences of his refusal, he went to his execution willingly. And you find this same story again and again for the first couple hundred years after Christ in their own writings. Lawful, gentle, and humble obedience to the authorities up until they were asked to declare that “Caesar is Lord.” Yet once they were condemned to be executed for their refusal, they went to it willingly, being burnt at the stake, torn apart by wild beasts in the arenas, crucified, and beheaded. Given the option between betraying their discipleship of Christ and declaring their allegiance to the cult of Caesar or dying horrifically, they joyfully jumped in front of the lions, sung hymns from burning stakes, and humbly accepted crucifixion or beheading. Not once did they attempt to overthrow or change the government. Not once did they rebel except in their refusal to participate in the imperial cult.
     How are we to live in these times? The same way that these early Christian leaders and even Stoic philosophers lived during theirs. With gentle, lawful, and humble obedience to the authorities until they couldn’t. And when they couldn’t, they accepted the consequences. But their acceptance of those consequences, far from wiping them out, rooted them so deep that they grew in number and outlasted those who sought to stamp them out for their own selfish gains or ideologies.
     Recently, I wrote something on Facebook that seems appropriate to include here:
     “Hatred cannot be defeated by hatred. Violence only begets more violence. He who lives by the sword will also die by it. This last one is what every soldier or officer who carries a weapon must implicitly acknowledge at least the possibility of. Mountains of hard stone may last for eons, yet water, one of the softest of materials, is capable of carving channels through them.
     I've been seeing on the news and hearing about the vandalism of Teslas as a way to protest against Elon Musk's rather shady government position, and indirectly Trump himself. Who does it help? As many have pointed out, it does not hurt either Musk or Trump, but rather the owners of the Teslas and dealerships, who had nothing to do with Musk or Trump, who must now suffer the costs of damaged property. Even if they are insured, the insurance company has to pay for it, and will likely raise rates on Tesla owners for just this reason regardless of their political beliefs.
     People feel threatened right now by what's happening. That feeling is justified, but allowing our fear or anger to dictate how we respond only throws everything further into chaos and farther from where we were and where we want to be. In ancient Judea, two thousand years ago, people were angry at the Roman occupation too. They rebelled again and again, lashed out at the soldiers that were stationed there, murdering some. The Romans responded with brutal force again and again. Ultimately, the kingdom wasn't restored as the rebels hoped, but the temple was razed to the ground, and the Romans hunted down every last rebel, ending them at Masada.
     Had they done what Jesus taught, the Roman legion would have left of its own accord because there would have been no need of them to stay. Had they turned the other cheek, gone the extra mile, loved their enemies, and forgiven--why would the Romans have needed to keep their forces there when they were needed elsewhere? The temple would likely still be standing today if they had just done what He told them to do. There would have been no Titus and his legions, there would have been no Roman holocaust, there would have been no Masada.
     Do you want to resist evil? Do you want to see it destroyed? Then love. Love those who hate you. Do good to those who abuse and mistreat you. Will people get hurt? Yes. But people will get hurt if you use violence and hatred as well. If you use the tools of your enemy, you become the thing you're fighting against. If you can, help others, if you cannot help them, at the very least, do no harm.
     Consider these people as beloved family members who are severely mentally ill. How would you treat them? Would you want them harmed or healed? Would you want them destroyed, or in their right minds? The only way to accomplish that is through love and compassion.”
     I also wrote this:
     “We are each of us trying to do the "right thing" and follow "the good." The problem is we're all coming at it with different sets of information and the beliefs built on that information. We all want to do and be the right thing, but like Maximus in the recent Fallout series said, nobody can agree on how to go about it. The only way we all rise above this and heal from it is if we love and place love and compassion for one another as a higher priority than being "right." The only true "right" and "wrong" things are those born from either love or fear, and continuing to fear what we do not agree with or do not understand, and to act on that fear, will only drive us further into darkness, pain, and suffering. We must see each other, not as threats, but as ourselves and see ourselves in each other.”
     As history shows, those who did do what Jesus taught eventually outlasted those who oppressed and persecuted them. Those who loved their enemies, forgave, practiced non-judgment, and lived their lives in love apart from fear eventually not only survived, but technically conquered even the Roman empire by the fourth century.
     St. Paul also wrote, “As much as possible, live in peace with all people.” A couple of his friends in Ephesus were high ranking Roman authorities, Asiarchs, who were themselves in charge of the imperial cult. They were pagans and not Christians, and yet they were friends of St. Paul. Paul didn’t judge them for who they were or what they believed. He just loved them. The same was true of the Roman Centurion whose kid Jesus healed, the slave whose ear was cut off whom Jesus healed, and others.
     Yes, the United States we knew is gone, just like the old Roman Republic was gone. From what I can see, it’s not coming back. It’s a call, not to arms, but to remember that this world isn’t our home. Our true citizenship isn’t with any country in this life, our genuine ancestry originates in eternity. These bodies and identities are avatars in a much larger MMORPG. Our real home, the genuine Reality from which we came and will return to, is unaffected by anything which happens here. Both Jesus and the Stoic philosophers taught not to fear those who can kill the body. After they kill the body, what else can they do to you? Nothing. And you are not your body. You are not your self-identity. They can exile you, beat you, execute you, strip you and leave you naked, but they cannot actually harm “you” any more than a boss or mob in an MMORPG can harm the real “you.” Don’t betray what Jesus taught because of lights, shadows, and illusions of this life. It’s really, really not worth it.
     As for me, I am forced to reckon with this reality by everything which has happened. That isn’t a bad thing. It’s a painful thing, but not a bad one. It’s time to let go of what was. I will never declare “Caesar is Lord” whether it refers to the ancient Romans or to the 47th president of the U.S. But that does not mean I set my heart on hating him or anyone who worships him. It means I speak the truth and accept the consequences of it even as I prepare food and drink for those coming to arrest me, as much as they want.

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.