You Cannot Love a Person You See As a Threat

 You cannot love someone whom your brain is screaming at you is a threat. You can certainly have an attachment to them, as many have attachments to those who threaten them, but that is not loving them. To love someone is a choice, not an attachment or an emotion. The moment you see someone as a threat, your fear response kicks in which then can also trigger your aggression response. The brain only knows two ways to deal with threats. Seeing the other person as yourself, or yourself in the other person, having compassion on them, is not one of them. The brain cannot be allowed to engage its threat response system if it is your goal to love this other person. You can either love this other person, or you can see them as a threat, but you cannot do both. Your brain will not allow you to do it.

     Therefore, when you are aggressive towards someone, you cannot love them simultaneously in that moment. When you are scared of someone, you cannot simultaneously love them in that moment. Again, love is a choice to have compassion on the other person, to see yourself in the other person. It is an action, not an emotion.

     If we are to love the person next to us as ourselves, then we cannot see them as a threat. Whether or not we see them as a threat is up to us. It is a choice we make, or rather it is a choice we are capable of making upon reflection of our own subconscious attitudes, biases, and preconceptions. One does not try to protect themselves from a person whom they are choosing to love as themselves. This is why Jesus taught to "turn the other cheek," and "if someone takes your coat, give him your shirt as well," and "if someone forces to go one mile with him, go with him two." He also explicitly taught to "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse and misuse you." In order to do these things, you cannot see this other abusive person as a threat. Love and fear are mutually exclusive. As John wrote, "Love brought to completion tosses fear out."

     The threat and needs assessment system in the human brain is to what Paul was referring when he talked about "the flesh" in almost every case. As John wrote also, "God is love." Paul wrote, "Operate in the Spirit, and you will in no wise bring the works of the flesh to fulfillment." We must disengage from this threats and needs assessment system and submit to or cooperate with the Spirit of Christ in order to love so that it is God who acts and speak through us, because then it is Love Himself who will be responding to the other person, regardless of what they do or say.

The Difference Between "Preachers" and "Shepherds"

 It is still my opinion, and it has only grown stronger with time, that spending at least a year tending livestock should be a requirement for becoming a pastor. You don't really understand what it means to shepherd a flock until you've done it literally. There's a difference between a shepherd and a preacher. The preacher gets up into the pulpit every Sunday and spends an hour talking. The shepherd spends every day tending to the needs of their flock. The shepherd checks their water and food every day. The shepherd gets to know each one of them by name, their personalities, which animals tend to form a clique and which are left on the outside, which animals are the alphas and which are at the bottom of the ranking order. The shepherd observes who's getting enough food and who's not, who's taking too much, and who's being shoved away from the feed tin. Preachers observe none of these things. 

     The preachers who put on Sunday morning "shows" observe none of these things. Their job isn't to get to know and look after their charges, it's just to say a liturgy and preach for an hour once or twice a week. I just watched the film "Man of God" today about St. Nektarios of the Greek Orthodox Church. This man was a shepherd. He screamed "shepherd." Mother Theresa was a shepherd, too, regardless of her rank or status. I can think of others both real and fictional. 

     I myself wasn't a very good shepherd when I wore the collar. I didn't really understand what it meant. I loved being Jesus for people and giving Jesus to people in the Sacraments, but I didn't really get the actual shepherd part. I wish I had. I know I would have done things differently. If I had been able to relate to the people who came under my charge half as well as I find myself looking after and caring for the animals under my charge... Those goats, dogs, cats, and chickens have taught me more about pastoring than any of the courses I had ever taken in college, or many of the pastors I had ever seen.

All are Members of the Logos but Not All are In Communication with the Head

     I was reading this morning in “After” by Bruce Greyson, M.D. and I reached the chapter titled, “What About God?” For context, this book in the account of Dr. Greyson’s decades of research into Near Death Experiences, and contains many quotes and recountings from those who have experienced them. I highly, highly recommend this book because of Dr. Greyson’s methodical, science based approach to the topic. In general, the majority of NDEers encounter a Divine Being in some way. Frequently it is Jesus Christ, and then moving on to experiencing a Being they call “God” for lack of a better term, but it is universally understood that this term doesn’t do any justice to the overwhelming Source of Being, Love, Peace, and Acceptance that wraps them in His embrace.

     In many cases, the person experiencing the NDE also comes to the understanding that they, their soul or mind, is somehow the same as this Source, but not. They are a part of this Source, though distinct from it. As one person put it, “IT was me and IT was not me. I was IT and I was not IT. I was *in* IT, *of* IT, yet still simultaneously my individual unique beingness. I knew myself to be precisely precious to this Presence of Light and Sound, as if I was an atom of IT. A drop of the ocean is the essence of the ocean, though not the ocean; the ocean is not complete except for the existence of the presence of every single drop of which it is composed. That is how I related to the Light and Sound in which I was immersed.” (p. 156) I cannot help but be reminded of how Paul describes the Body of Christ in his letters, and how it is made up of many “members” or literally, “body-parts.” It is occurs to me that this is not as much of a metaphor as I was initially taught, but a deeper, and more literal truth. In Stoic philosophy, from where the concept of the Logos comes, there is this same understanding of all human beings holding a share, piece, or literally “shred” of the divine logos, and all human beings for this reason being children of the God. One Logos, one Head, but also many logoi which are a part of the Logos and are Sourced from the God and are parts or members of that one Logos.

     It is my opinion that the Body of Christ is made of its members with Christ as the head. From my reading, this is the same as the Logos in Stoic philosophy of which all human beings possess a piece, shred, or part of logos with the Logos as their head. My current thinking is that while all human beings possess this logos, not all are in obedience to, or under the control of, The Logos, that is, not all remain in communication with the Head like a member of the Body does with the brain through the nervous system. It is when a member of the body is in full communication with the head that it is able to function properly and normally. All are members of the body, but not all are in communication with the head. It is those who are properly in communication with the Head that are His disciples and can be considered to be properly functioning members of the Body of Christ. When these members are properly communicating and following the instructions of the Head, then it can be said that the Head is acting and speaking through them. 

     There are too many who call themselves Christians, from any denomination, who don't even know where to begin in proper communication with their Head. They aren't taught. They're taught doctrines, dogmas, and theologies, but they're not taught how to disengage from their own malfunctioning flesh and surrender to the Spirit of Christ, the Logos. This is equally true, and most dangerously true, of much of the visible Church's leadership. As Jesus said, frequently they do not enter the Kingdom themselves and they prevent others from entering as well.

Why Am I Doing What I'm Doing?

 Take a minute. Ask yourself what's motivating you to do what you're doing or say what you're saying? The other day, I really had to ask myself why I looked at the news, and what was motivating it. When it really got down to brass tacks, it was my threat response that was motivating it. I wanted to be informed. Why? Because I didn't want to be caught not knowing what was happening. Why? Because I wanted to be prepared if something went south, that is, if something went wrong and could possibly affect me or those I care about. This is a perfectly human response. It is also entirely governed by my brain's threat assessment and response system, not from any motivation stemming from the Spirit of Christ. I want to look at the news because I want to be aware of potential threats. There are, of course, other kinds of news, but even this has this undercurrent, if only subtly. It starts boiling down to how do I avoid threats and encourage desirable things, whatever those might happen to be? 

     This is, fundamentally, a perfectly normal, human way of looking at the world. It is the base, default way for looking at and assessing the world, really. It is also, at its very core, hamartia. Instead of being motivated by, in cooperation with, or under the control of the Spirit of Christ and displaying love, joy, peace, patience, trust, kindness, courtesy, and self-control; instead of these things, whether I have good intentions or not, I am looking to do away with threats and maximize whatever I consider necessities or desirable. 

     The Spirit of Christ is not concerned with threats or necessities because nothing can threaten Him, and He is already sufficient for everything. Threats and necessities are entirely the scope of the physical body, the brain's self-defense mechanism, but I, you, and we are not our physical bodies. We inhabit them temporarily before returning to our Source. This threat response system has its proper place in keeping the body alive and in procreation, but it cannot govern everything we do, and it is dysfunctional to where unless it is checked, that's exactly what it does. It always views everything in terms of threats or necessities, what it calls "bad" or "good."

     There is nothing inherently wrong with looking at the news, but I have to be aware of why, and what impact it has on me. Is it going to feed the fear response? Is it going to feed the aggression response? This is true of anything we engage with. Is it going to feed the feeding response? The sexual response? Again, these things are not wrong in and of themselves, but they become problems when they are what is driving us and do not shut down when they are supposed to. When left to its own devices, the brain will pursue all of these things with little to no control to varying degrees depending on the person's brain chemistry.

     Disengaging from this and engaging with or "enslaving oneself to" the Spirit of Christ allows the source of one's actions and words to be rooted in the God who is Love, and His Joy, Peace, Patience, and so on. It allows for this threat response system to shut down when it's appropriate for it to do so rather than try to govern all actions and events inappropriately.

     So, take a minute and really look at what is motivating you to do what you're doing. Ask this one simple question, "Why?"

The Disciple of Jesus Christ, Obeying the Law, and Swearing an Oath to Caesar

 I was recently re-reading the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Polycarp was the Bishop of Smyrna at the beginning of the second century and a contemporary of Ignatius the Bishop of Antioch who was martyred in 105CE. Polycarp himself would be martyred a few decades later at the age of 86. While the details of his death are extraordinary, the lesson which I want to focus on is why he was executed, because it was a real thing during this period.

     Put simply, Polycarp, like Ignatius, refused to acknowledge Caesar as his lord. He, like Ignatius and many, many other martyrs, refused to offer incense or sacrifice at the official imperial altars to Caesar. This wasn't just a religious offense, this was a civil one. By refusing to acknowledge the divinity or dominion of Caesar, whichever Caesar it happened to be at the time, they were committing treason against the Roman Empire as far as the empire was concerned, especially after the Christians were blamed by Nero for the fire which consumed Rome. What they were doing was illegal under Roman law, and punishable by death.

     My thoughts on this are these. Simply because something is the law doesn't make it right, and just because it's illegal doesn't make it wrong. We've seen this again and again throughout history, and even into the modern day with various regimes around the world. One can look to the Nazi regime in Germany during the thirties and forties to see prime examples of this. Legality does not necessitate ethicality. 

     My second thought on the subject is to compare the view of these ancient Christians towards swearing allegiance to Caesar with the view of modern American Christianity towards their own government. Would modern American Christians refuse to swear allegiance to their government or call their head of state "Lord" today? Most believe that patriotism to one's country, and some today to their head of state specifically, goes hand in hand with their Christian faith. Would they have refused Caesar, or would they have gladly saluted him and sacrificed as good patriots?

     The Christian, the disciple of Jesus Christ, who lives as Jesus taught and walks as He walked is not ruled by laws of any kind, but by the love of God dictating what he says and does. He will obey those laws as long as they are consistent with this love, and when they are not, he cannot. The disciple of Jesus Christ lives by the Spirit of Christ acting and speaking through him, and in surrender to that Spirit so that it is God Himself who loves through him and acts and speaks through him. You need to pay taxes? Here you go. You need to park in a certain spot, or not? Sure. Murder and theft are out of the question because it is the love of God ruling him. But you want me to hurt someone? Not a chance. You want me to defraud someone, cause someone harm, or surrender myself to anyone other than Jesus Christ? Not going to happen no matter what laws are written down or what the penalty may be, and it's not going to happen because that person has surrendered control of himself to God and God Himself will not do these things. God Himself will love first, love always, and love without end.

     This is what Paul meant when he said that if you walk in the Spirit, then you are not subject to the law. Why would the God who is acting and speaking through you be subject to any human laws except as a courtesy? As Jesus taught, "the sons of the kingdom are free." Jesus Himself only bothered paying the temple tax as a courtesy to those who brought it up.

     Finally, Polycarp understood something few Christians today really get. No one can actually harm the real you except perhaps you yourself. What's interesting is that the Stoics understood this concept fairly well. They, like Polycarp, understood that someone else can only harm or possibly kill the body, but they cannot actually harm the "you" that is animating the body, and once you let go of the body, what harm can anyone actually do to you? As Jesus also taught, "don't fear those who can kill the body, but can't kill the soul..." As a result, Polycarp didn't run from those coming to arrest him. Instead, he fixed refreshments for them. He was given the choice several times to swear to Caesar and refuse Christ. He chose to be burned at the stake in Smyrna, and was a smart-alec about it too. 

Mexican Flags, Protests, and California's Uniqueness Among the States

I've been seeing that Fox News is making a big deal about Mexican flags being waved at the protests and exaggerating it beyond reason into a "Mexican Invasion." Having grown up in California, and 35 miles south of LA, let me explain why this is nonsense shouted by people who don't understand California, either it's history or culture. For some Californians, flying or displaying the Mexican flag is no different than folks from the South like Tennessee or Alabama displaying or flying the Confederate flag, a symbol of literal treason against the U.S. 

     California has a very different history from the Eastern half of the U.S. Its history wasn't shaped by the Civil War, the Reconstruction, or a lot of what happened east of the Mississippi. California was, at one time, a part of Mexico until it was annexed by the U.S. If you Google the demographics of California, it's 40% Hispanic, 37% White, and 15% Asian with other ethnicities such as Middle Eastern and African American rounding it out. There is no majority ethnicity there. 

      While there was a single Garrison there somewhere in California, it was otherwise uninvolved in the Civil War. Its history was defined by Spanish Missions, Mexican heritage, the Gold Rush, Vineyards, and heavy farming and ranching including the Citrus Groves in SoCal that Orange County was named for. Many Chinese immigrated to California in the mid eighteen hundreds. After Saigon fell in 1975, many, many Vietnamese immigrated to Southern California. When I was a kid growing up in SoCal, it was said that there were two hundred languages spoken on a daily basis in Orange Country alone, and at least sixty spoken in my high school. California, more than any other state in the Union, is truly a culture and civilization of immigrants. Most of its white residents were themselves immigrants to California in the 1800s, as prior to this, its population was made up entirely of Mexican and Native American peoples (and here Mexican means descended from the Mexica or Aztec peoples). 

     There is in LA and other parts of SoCal in particular, because of California's history, a nativist movement that still believes California is or should be Mexican. Their numbers are very few, and to be honestly, no one's ever really taken them seriously. But they, and others of Mexican descent there who aren't quite so delusional, whether citizen or immigrant, are still fiercely proud of their heritage. It shouldn't really surprise anyone that the ICE raids targeting Hispanic people in particular would have triggered them in such a way as was seen in Downtown LA. They see it, citizen or not, as a threat against themselves and their people, their tribe if you will. To what lengths would you go to protect your people and your family from being kidnapped and assaulted? The truth is, what should surprise people is the restraint they've shown so far.

     No one in California wants any of this. Of this, I am absolutely certain. I guarantee you, everyone there just wants to live their lives in peace without having to worry about whether or not their mother, father, or child is just going to disappear at the agency of the Federal Government. There would have been no protests at all if ICE hadn't been conducting the raids in the belligerent way they have been. If they had come with warrants, if they had come in marked cars identifying themselves without masks, if they had only targeted actual violent criminals like they were supposed to, if they hadn't treated innocent people like animals, then there would have been no protests. There would have been no cars burning. 

     The blame for these protests and violence must lie squarely on the shoulders of those who conducted the raids, and those superiors who ordered them.

The Only Fight That Matters

 Love one another. Be kind to one another. Forgive one another. If someone is cruel and hateful, look on them as a dear family member who is mentally ill and sick. The moment you see someone as a threat, fear takes over and love disengages. The moment you choose to love, fear must disengage. The two cannot coexist because the one cancels out the other in the brain. The primacy, importance, and superiority of love over all other religious practice, doctrines, rules, and traditions cannot be overstated. Without love, you have nothing at all. Without love, your beliefs and practices are worthless and cannot save you. The one who doesn't love doesn't know God. This cannot be said any more clearly. The one who doesn't love acts only from himself and his fear, anger, and cravings. God is love. This too cannot be said any more clearly. If love is not the source of your words, actions, and responses, then neither is God. You cannot have one without the other because one *is* the other. God is love. If you hate someone, how can you love God? You can't. It's written pretty clearly in the Scriptures.

     Today, at my doctor's appointment, the physician suggested that I was suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. Honestly, I just don't have time for that. I have animals to care for, people to be there for, and a life to live. But, if I was to be totally honest, I'm not sure he was wrong. I've learned strategies and techniques from all of my studies in psychology and religious and meditative practices in order to deal with my internal "stuff" so I can function as "normally" and effectively as possible. If I was to be totally honest however, internally within my mind it's a constant battle against anxiety about a number of things past, present, and future. 

     I just don't have time to give into the fears that constantly assault my mind. I have to acknowledge that they're there and plunge back into the fight regardless. Some days, that means socializing or counseling until I'm beyond overwhelmed. Some days, that means reflecting deeply on why I'm feeling the way I am and finding ways to not respond negatively. Some days it means involuntarily reliving past moments in my head and learning to let go every moment, or recite a prayer, or listen to music, or do something to get my mind to go in a different direction. 

     To be honest, I know a few meditation techniques, but meditation is hard for me. That may be because of the ADHD. My wife can slip into it within minutes. It takes me hours to reach a point of stillness sometimes, and I don't have that kind of time. But I know what happens if I don't fight and I let the fear take over and win. It becomes anger, and the anger builds until it unleashes. I have scared people when that happens, especially those closest to me. I used to get violent at times, especially when I was a kid. 

     So I make my stand within my mind, every moment, and I choose to love. I fight to love. I fight to care about others regardless of how I perceive they might or might not care about me. I fight to not let my anxiety, my fear, dictate to me how to respond no matter how hard it shouts at me, and it can shout very loudly. Often it takes the voice of people from my past and the things they have accused me of or hurt me with. Sometimes I lose a battle, and then I have to go back and do what I can to make things as right as possible. A relationship once damaged is no easy thing to fully repair. A trust once broken is even harder. 

     So, I fight within my mind, and I keep on fighting, because those around me need me to love them. They need not my fear, anger, and cravings, not my anxiety, but God through me, love through me, patience through me, compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, non-judgment, and self-control. They need a friend, a father, a husband, a counselor, a pastor, and someone from whom they can encounter and experience Jesus Christ. I may lose a battle on occasion, but losing the war is not an option. Letting the stuff in my mind just win and take control is an absolute no. Giving up is not an option. Too many people, even people I don't know or haven't met yet, are counting on me to keep fighting. I suppose, to use RPG parlance, I'm tanking it to make sure it doesn't target anyone else. Maybe that's why I usually play a tank as my primary role in those games. I'm used to it.

     When I write about disengaging from the Flesh, the malfunctioning or dysfunctional survival responses produced by the human amygdala, and asking Him to act and speak through you, I do not write from mere speculation or theological fancy. I depend on it every day, and every moment. I question myself and the source of my responses. Why did I say that, and where did it come from? I pray every day, every morning, and throughout the day, that it would be Him who has control over how I respond, speak, and act towards others. I am keenly aware of the consequences of letting down my guard on this. I am keenly aware of who can be hurt if I do.

     Love one another. It's the most important thing you can do, and the only thing which matters. Be kind to one another. Forgive one another. Be Jesus to people. Give Jesus to people. Receive Jesus from people. See Jesus in people. Pray that He would act and speak through you, that it would Him that people see and hear, and not you. Disengage from your fear no matter how hard it shouts, and surrender to His love, His very presence and power through you. This is where the true battle lies. This is the only fight that matters. This is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Don't Stay Silent

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

Don't Lie About Being A Christian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love The Person Located Next To You Like Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Fighting At All, The Jedi Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rambling Thoughts About The State Of Theology

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

Comparing Epictetus with Paul

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

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

I Am Not My Disability or Difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Authenticity of Paul

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

Because It's Israel

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

A Ramble About Death and Passing On

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

To Be A Christian - Part 2

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

To Be A Christian

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

A Ramble About Climate and Farming

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

The Linguistic Noise Inherent in Modern Bible Translations

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

A Ramble About Empty Temples

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

That Saturday...

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