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.

Of Diseased Trees and Good Fruit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      And then I realized, that was the point. 

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

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

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

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

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

On What Is And What Is Not Up To You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me plagiarize myself a little here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A longer list of the aftereffects are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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