Understanding "why" religions "exist"

I heard someone kind of stumble through a bit of a debate with a talk show host today and during my listening I heard the caller make the same old error in both facts and logic that you all are dealing with in the past two generations. In fact, this error has been taught in schools, so you are not alone in hearing it and taking it for granted. Here is the statement that is not factual or logical:

"Religions were developed by humans in order to make them behave in the way the society feels is proper."

Um....nooooooo, that's so wrong that it doesn't even pass the first and simplest criticism.

But before I shred the facts and logic, let me tell you the proper statement that is factual and logical, and thus you can follow my critique and criticism more easily. Here is a factual and logical truthful statement:

"Religions were developed as a means to interact with divine forces. A true religion is one based on actual interaction with the actual one and only God. A false religion is one based on presumed interactions with divinities that in actuality do not exist."

Here is the first and simplest way to totally refute the first statement and prove the second statement. What part of the pagan religion of the Greeks and Romans (worshipping the various gods of Olympus such as Zeus/Jupiter, Hera/Juno, Mars/Ares, etc) is an attempt to codify good behavior in humans? *tick tock tick tock tick tock....ring ring ring!* That's right: absolutely none. The pagan religions have two purposes and thus two activities (the "what" and the "why"), and one purpose/activity (the "what") is to tell stories (mythologies) about all the things those rascal gods are up to: sex, booze, jealousy, warfare, lots of lying and deception, tons of coveting, etc. So the Greek/Roman religions were filled with voyeuristic watching, through stories, of the shenanigans of the gods, and were certainly not templates for human behavior, and not even an idiot would have written down those mythologies claiming they inspire righteous behavior.

The second component, the "why" of those Greek/Roman beliefs is that they feared the world, which they did not understand, and so they projected (a human psychological term) their own "what if I were a god" thoughts upon the supposed supernatural forces. Ancient story tellers and elders would have thought of, using what they thought were reasonable assumptions, that gods were just like humans but much more powerful, and thus they organized their thoughts about the supernatural to resemble what "all powerful" human families (aka syndicates) would act like. So the "why" is that if gods were just like humans but with hair trigger anger and lots of gift/punishment ability, let's set up a system to worship and appease them with sacrifice and flattery.

So this is the easiest and most obvious way for you to see that for centuries, and indeed thousands of years, false religions developed because humans started with the "what you see is what you get" notion of a template for the so called gods and goddesses, which is what "we humans do here on earth, well, they must do the same thing but on a super scale 'up there.'" That is the opposite of a religion being developed to codify righteous behavior, because false religions imagine that gods are just like humans but "more so."

Now let's look at a shade of gray area, which is Hinduism. And remember, as I've stated before, I've never criticized sincere traditional follows of any religion, but I will point out error (and have done so including in my own religious institution (not the doctrine) of the Catholic Church.) So here is the problem with Hinduism: what part of the most rigid caste system ever developed among humanity is a "way to make people behave better" or be more righteous? None, of course. However, you do start to see how even in religions that contain error, the impulse to understand and cultivate goodness is there, and that is why the erroneous but understandable principle of karma and/or reincarnation came into being. So Hinduism is like a blending of the two "whats" about why a religion is developed, why it comes into being: one part is the what of imagining that there are multiple gods in human like family groups with sex, war, coveting and so forth, and so sacrifice must be made to them because they will be angry, or to gain favor, but there is also the second part which is an attempt to interact with divinity by being good, and thus through some un-understandable way receive good karma and better reincarnation.

I explained that the Holy Spirit of the one true God does indeed move among all people of the world, all the time, believers or non-believers (more urgently in the latter, obviously), in order to make the true one God known. Likewise people reach out to the "spirit," knowing in their hearts that there must be some ultimate goodness, even if it cannot be seen. In this effort the people who first codified Hinduism felt a touch of the Holy Spirit and interpreted that in some unseen way one does live on forever based on good behavior.

Buddhism is a prime example of what I am saying, even though people who don't give it much thought ascribe the first hypothesis (the erroneous one) to its existence. People have a reflexive, and understandable, though wrong, thought that since much of Buddhism is about goodness and good behavior that it must have developed for that reason. Well, the history shows otherwise. People, including the Buddha, do not meditate in order to come up with a list of good behaviors and thus "invent" a religion! If they wanted to "invent" a religion they would consult lawyers, judges, elders and so forth and have a list of do's and don'ts. No.... a person who goes into a contemplative life, one filled with meditation, is not trying to come up with a list of do's and don'ts, but is trying to communicate with divinity. So once again, like the Hinduism, Buddha and the early Buddhists touched some aspects of the Holy Spirit, but did not discern the presence of the one God. A key difference is that we know that the Buddha had disciples who wrote down his thoughts and thus created a system for passing on and amplifying the insights and conclusions of his meditations. Again, that's further demonstration that the Buddha's disciples were not setting out to "invent" a religion to "control" or encourage good behavior per se, though they were obviously pleased at whatever work they did that did so as a result.

So here is how you can now turn to the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and easily understand they were not "developed" in order to "make people be good." God initiated conversation with Adam and Eve when they were in Eden, when they had "everything," when they had no need to be "good." God started "talking" to human beings directly at a time when God provided everything for them, not when they were lawless and needing "goodness." A true religion arises (as distinct from being developed or invented) when humans have authentic communication with the actual one true God.

The caller argued that Judaism/Christianity was "invented" when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. Um, what? That was thousands of years after when God first made himself known and had many, many, many generations of interactions with believers who had a genuine relationship with him. Um, the religion had already come into being at the first moment of genuine communication with the one true God, well before God responds to the needs of humans in order to serve him (not in order to be "good") by giving them his Laws.

Remember, humans were already "good" because they were created by God, and all his creations were deemed "good" by God. So there is a vast difference between "good behavior," which should be the desire of all people, and "knowing and serving God," which is the purpose of true religion of the true God.

Adam and Eve did not fall from God's favor because they had unlawful or bad behavior in the way that modern humans think of it. They fell because they disobeyed the one thing God told them not to do, which is to try to duplicate what God himself only is able to do. They wanted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge not so they could commit more burglaries or engage in voter fraud, or have domestic violence, etc.... they wanted to have the wisdom that God alone has. And who tempted them? Not the angel who runs around committing grand larceny, molesting little kids, robbing banks, declaring wars, etc, but the angel who thought he knew as much or if not as much then at least the loopholes of God, the angel who would not serve, Lucifer.

So there is nothing in the thousands of years of factual, legitimate and truthful dialogue between the one true God and the humans who heard and believed him that is a step by step cookbook or programming exercise in developing a list of good behaviors for humans to follow. What you do have is a history of people trying to understand God, know God and most of all, serve God, no matter how imperfectly. When one faithfully loves and knows God, good behavior is a natural outflow of serving God.

Here is where people who still have some trouble with what I am explaining raise the following (bogus but understandable) comparison. "Yes," they say, "But you say pagans sacrifice to false gods out of fear of their moodiness and capriciousness based on their power over humans. So why does the true God 'make' people sacrifice to him, as in the Old Testament?"

Ah, but if you read the passages in Genesis about sacrifice (many of which I have keyed into this blog and commented on), each of the earliest sacrifices (starting with the first documented by Cain and Abel) were not done for fear of God, but to celebrate "giving back" part of their harvests. Sacrifice to God is not idolatry but the first form of tithing, of returning to God a part of what God has given to people in the first place. Each and every subsequent building of an altar and an offering of sacrifice to God commemorated gratitude for a significant event. Abraham was and remains the model for understanding the true purpose of building an altar and offering a sacrifice, so do read the passages where he does so and you'll better understand what I mean.

When God codified the requirements of sacrifice through Moses (where he made formal ritual and requirements for sacrifice) he did so thousands of years after people had already been behaving in godly ways in service to him and had been sacrificing in honor and tithing to God. God made more formal requirements for two reasons (and notice none of them are to "make people behave better.") The first reason is that when people did commit sin they needed a consistency in paying a penalty to God. So the people as a whole were expected to do the same thing upon the same occasions for the same reason that if one of your children lies you make them do without dessert while if the other child lies you beat them, that would be a gross inconsistency. Humans have enough trouble with understanding the All Knowingness and All Power of God, and humans are notoriously bad at determining the price of "other people's" "sin." Imagine if God had not regulated sacrifice how if the person who caught the envy of someone in power would suffer odious requirements for "penance," while for the same "sin" the buddy of the chief would get off with sacrificing an old shoe or something. So God required a constancy and consistency of sacrifice when humans had reached the point where they would be tempted to use God's "forgiveness" in self serving ways.

The second reason that Laws and accompanying sacrifice and other rituals became codified by God is so that people would not have to imagine, rightly or wrongly, what was "all right" or "OK" to do to serve God and what was not. Remember, God has chosen his people, the Israelites, so they were already his, as he led them through Moses out of slavery. Now God is telling them how to serve him, not "how to behave good." Serving God is the first and utmost requirement and it is no coincidence that the Commandments are ordered accordingly. If one truly honors the name of God, fears God, loves God and keeps one's self sanctified to him, one then does not really want to murder, steal, lie and covet.

It's not like the Israelites were all running around in the desert robbing banks or something, and so God puts His foot down and says, "They need some laws to behave right." No, God explained to them how to serve God, and that is the job that they were failing miserably at (all the backsliding into idolatry even as God is right there with them, for example), not lawlessness or bad behavior. In the later books in the Bible, those before and during the captivity to Babylon, you read about the lawlessness and bad behavior in all those conventional ways (rich extorting the poor, etc) but that was because they had already abandoned so much of their service to God in their hearts. Bad behavior is an outflow of not sanctifying one's self to God's service. That is why a person could commit a million "good deeds" to "help fellow humanity" and yet still not be saved because it is serving God that earns one heaven, which is unmerited grace, not "works" or "good behavior."

Notice that Jesus Christ in preaching the Beatitudes, his first great (mega-) sermon to the crowds, that he starts not with a list of "good behavior" or don'ts, but in comforting those who were doing without through no fault of their own the goodness of life's joys.

Matthew 5:1-12
And seeing the crowds, he went up the mountain. And when he was seated, his disciple came to him. And opening his mouth he taught them, saying,
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice's sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when men reproach you, and persecute you, and speaking falsely, say all manner of evil against you, for my sake.
Rejoice and exult, because your reward is great in heaven; for so did they persecute the prophets who were before you.

If you truly read and examine the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, you will notice, just as in the Old Testament, how little is "do's" and "don'ts" of good behavior. It is ALL about serving God and thus goodness is the outflow from what comes first, knowing, honoring and fearing God (read my series on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit to understand how the path to sanctity in service to God is scripturally explained).

Think about this carefully because Jesus is the "beginning" of Christianity. How much of what Jesus preached is codifying "laws" for Christian "good behavior?" This is an easy question to get wrong because Jesus is the model of good Christian behavior, but not because he set forth more or less do's and don'ts. Thus no one can read the Gospel and say that people "made it up" in order to "make people behave good." Christianity is so obviously not invented with the purpose of making more ordered, law abiding, good behaved people. Christianity is the heralding of the New Covenant with the already well understood God, and in the New Covenant of serving God by understanding Jesus to be Lord and Savior (the Messiah), good behavior is the natural outflow of genuine sanctification in God's sight by emulating and following Jesus as he actually was, not how he was imagined or caricatured.

You understand a man or woman by where he or she places their priorities in life. We all know people who care the most about their jobs, or their children, their health or their addictions, etc. Whenever you get a little lost about understanding the divine and human complexity of Jesus, read Matthew 5:1-12 over and over, and think of this. Of all the things he could have stated in the opening of his first, great mega-sermon, he chose to list the comforts, including seeing God, that those who genuinely lack in the joys of life today will receive. He did not start with a list of admonishments of bad behavior. Jesus' priority was to turn those who were poor, unhappy and suffering due to shortages in life toward God's nearness, and not in chastising those who have any part in causing deprivation or suffering. Why? Because Jesus came in order to show the people the face of God via the human form of Jesus and draw people nearer to God, not to regulate their behavior.

Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.
Jesus does not have to list all the ways that people have dirty hearts and then tell them not to do it and chastise them, reminding them of certain punishment. If Christianity were "invented" so that people "behaved better," then this would be the starting place to list all the problems, loopholes, errors and bad thinking, but 1) that has already be covered in abundance throughout the Old Testament and 2) God is comforting those on the right path, that of service to and trusting in God, the Father.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Jesus does not have to list all the "bad" wars, and explain "good conflict" from "inappropriate conflict." Again, if you serve God honestly and with a whole heart it becomes rather obvious who is a peacemaker and who is not. Jesus is reaching out God's comfort to those who already are on the path to being children of God because they have their hearts open to Jesus' message and they need his comfort.

So, to wrap up this posting and give you time to think about what I've touched upon here, do not fall into the trap of agreeing with something that sounds "logical" and "obvious" but does not, if you pause even briefly, stand up to any scrutiny or proof. It seems so "logical" that religions were "invented" so that people "behave good," yet the history of each religion shows that this is not at all what/why and "how" religions were "developed" at all! It's amazing how in these modern generations such errors are repeated over and over. If you asked one hundred years ago any person "why religion" "existed," he or she would have answered "to know God." It's only recently that it seems that everything people used to understand has been removed from their brains, willfully, and replaced with agenda and phoniness. Modern control freaks think that their ancestors were control freaks, and it just was not so and the proof is in the actual writings of each faith. True faiths, even those based on some error, all stem from a genuine attempt to reach and commune with God in understanding and good will. False faiths are those who do not connect authentically with the Holy Spirit, and those that attempt to diminish the all power and control of the one true God into a flawed human model. But even the most false of the faiths (the Greek and Roman pantheon of so called gods) did not arise because some author was trying to "get the people to be good." Har, har, ha ha, some models those were, if so. No, it was from those people's misunderstanding that divinity must be flawed like humans, of trying to pull the presumed dwellers of the firmament down to earth to be "like humans" but with "godly powers." So even the falsest of the well known "religions" of modern times did not spring from the presumed agenda based ambitions of someone with the intention of "thinking up some religion to make people be good." Sometimes the facts are just ridiculously obvious, but one must not be bum rushed into believing something that sounds so "logical," yet withstands absolutely no real scrutiny.

(Hi young people, miss you....) thinking of you as always and hoping that you in particular find this helpful. Someday some of you must tell me just what they ARE exactly teaching in schools, if not facts and logic? Hmm.

Another meditation about God's love

Here is another thought about that subject, so that it can help you to better understand God and his mercy (which is not extended to the blatantly unrepentant, but that's another subject). God is the source of and the capacity for infinite love, on such a dimension of vastness that humans cannot comprehend. Here is a real life recollection of mine so you can compare (and also see things a bit from my point of view).

Years ago I had great affection and ardor for a man who did not return it (and indeed, was quite insincere). One of the women who worked for me, and who was on a friendly basis with me (though I cannot call it a friendship as she would never socialize with me beyond the occasional work luncheon) commented basically the following to me:

She said, with some disdain (kind of like she thought I was a rather pathetic sort) something like "I would find it a great turn-off to love someone who didn't love me in return." In other words, she thought it rather stupid and pathetic of me to care for someone who did not care for me in return.

I thought, but could not say at the time (since as my regular readers know, I was not public in my witnessing at that time, since it was both not my time yet and also a matter of my safety): "Wow, it's sure a good thing for YOU and for everyone else that God does not feel the same way!"

You see, God is used to loving humans who do not love him in return. In fact, if you think about it, there's no human that deserves his love at all, yet he continues to pour it onto them, mostly through the constant urging and nudging of the Holy Spirit, who tries to reach and soften even the hardest of hearts.

If God felt the way this lady suggested, there would be no human beings at all, none would be created and none would be alive.

God understands that no one can love him the way he is able to love a human. He doesn't expect even a fraction of what he can extend in love. But constant scorn and negligence of God is not only foolhardy but also such a wasted opportunity, since God extends such leeway in the amount of love that he would find pleasing from any human being. If God was "turned off" by a human not loving him in return, well, let's just say earth would be abundant in plant and animal life, a garden of Eden, with no non-loving humans!

But God created humans in his own image and as a result 1) they all have the capacity to love God and 2) the Holy Spirit works constantly to touch the heart of every human being with love, whether they believe or not, and whether they love in return or not.

For you idiot cult believers, she was a Libra ha ha, you know, the sign of "relationship experts" har har har.

How can humans ever spiritually advance, say nothing of being saved, if they consider love a "you first then maybe I will love in return" game?

Really, it is sad.

Another thought, what if before Jesus was born, Jews were given ballots with a brief description of him in advance, and could vote whether he was worthy of their love before "allowing" him to be born? Like I said, if God waits for the love first, none of you would be around, alive, at all, that is for sure.

I hope that you have found this helpful.

And, to show you I always think of you.... Hey again, my young people readers and fans! I wish that I could speak with you in person. When you wrestle with love and its issues, be sure to think of what I just said, which is that God loves you first, no matter how much love you offer him in return. Believe me, if you begin to know God as he really is, you would not be able to halt in loving him, no matter how much you tried! :-)

Christmas meditation

I'd like you to think about something, so I'm presenting it as a meditation, one that is easily applicable to anyone who believes in the one true God and the Holy Spirit. It's particularly appropriate to think about on Christmas Day, however, it is something that I try to explain to people in my spiritual direction ministry all the time.

While the Holy Spirit must and needs to be defined in a number of ways in order to be truthfully understood, there is a meditative image that is also proper and essential, which is to think of the Holy Spirit as God breathing outward and exuding pure love.

Many Christians think that they understand God's love because they are grateful to God for the gift of salvation, after suffering and rejection on their behalf, of God the Father's Son Jesus Christ. Friends, here is what I am trying to share with you. Even if you fully understand and appreciate God's love in the form of Jesus Christ's love for you and sacrifice on your behalf, you only understand a fraction of God's love.

Loving God through Jesus Christ is good and it is correct, but understand it this way. To consider yourself completely aware of God's love only through the gift of Jesus Christ is like loving your parent because he or she gave to you an awesome and perfect present. You are still in danger of only loving your parent, and in this case God, because he gave you the best gift that you ever had. You still are not loving God, and thus, not feeling in return, all of God's love that you could experience, just as you are not appreciating the parent for all that he or she does because of the awesome one time for all gift.

In other words, I am telling you that you can understand and experience God's love directly, which is the source of the gift of Jesus Christ. In addition to loving God for having given to you, to all of you, Jesus Christ, you should also love God, and receive his love, simply for being God day after day, minute after minute. God is constantly exuding, through the Holy Spirit, a purity and constancy of love that few, except the most special saints through the ages, have comprehended even exists. But the Bible is complete with beautiful words, often those of God himself, expressing his love before he sent the best gift of his love in the form of Jesus Christ.

Do not love God because he gives you things, either real or imaginary (as you assume to have "abilities" that you presume are from the Spirit) because even as correct or well intentioned that love is, it is only a fraction of the entire spectrum of love that constantly beams down from God in the heavens upon you. That is another useful analogy. Loving God for all he has given to you is good, and correct, but if you love God only for the good things you have received (or hope to receive) it is like loving just the yellow visible band of light in the light spectrum, without loving the light itself.

If one experiences even for a few seconds a genuine acceptance and reciprocation of God's pure love through the Holy Spirit, it is amazing beyond belief and makes all other imagined loves (and transcendental experiences) fade in comparison into nothingness... but here's the thing. God's pure love through the Holy Spirit does not rival earthly attachments but enhances them in their goodness too. In other words, you do not become addicted to being totally within God's love through the Holy Spirit, rather, you are able and empowered to experience genuine earthly love... you do not need continual "hits" in order to carry on. Once one realizes in one's heart the amount of love that is available from God through his Holy Spirit, it does not have to be "re-administered" as if it were a ritual or a "high," but it makes you aware of the light in its fullness, even as you continue to live in the partial reality of material and earthly life.

When you feel the pureness of the Holy Spirit's God bearing love for you, it rocks your world and changes you forever. Rather than detaching and diminishing it makes you more protected and secure within actual reality, including life in an imperfect world. Too many modern "meditations" lead people away from attachment to the source of all pure love, which is God through his Holy Spirit. As one thinks one is reaching spiritual enlightenment and spiritual strengthening, one is actually detaching not only from the reality of the world, but the reality of God's personal and individual love available to you.

Here is another analogy to help. Suppose that your mother gave you an awesome gift, the best gift you could ever have, and it is a good thing to have, for it is godly and worthy. But suppose by having that gift you are immensely grateful to her for giving it to you, but you forget about all the times she bound your wounds when you fell, encouraged you in your homework, gave you hugs and kisses even when you considered yourself too grown up for them, when she went without new things of her own in order to provide for you, etc. You have become so blinded by the one awesome gift that she gave to you that you no longer notice how she does the other 99 percent of the time things of love and sacrifice FOR you, not given to you. Likewise you could love your father for something great that he gave to you, but forget that he labors in a job he detests but endures in order to support you.

That's how it often is with God. Even the most godly person is overwhelmed with gratitude for God's gift of the Savior Jesus Christ so much so that he or she no longer gives or seeks God's day to day love, in its most awesome and even knee shaking form, the pure love of God given to you through the Holy Spirit. It's like even the most godly people are so focused on being (correctly) grateful to God and the things he has given to them (both individually and also in the form of the Savior) that they never experience and thus do not feel even a fraction of the awesome purity of God's love like a beam of the purest gold and silver enfolding them in wings. If you catch the Holy Spirit's eye in genuine love, not trying to "summon" its "force," the purity of love will just about bowl you over and it will change you and your understanding of God forever.

Why incorrect faiths have some merits

It's a provocative sounding title, but not meant to be, just terse in order to fit in the heading space. However, I know that many (though hopefully fewer than there used to be) will not like the implication that there are incorrect faiths. This is because people confuse tolerance with truth. Tolerance means you put up with people who may believe something totally wrong. Truth means it is correct and based on facts. It is not being intolerant to say that certain faiths and "beliefs" lack a truthful and/or factual foundation. It's being brave to say that, ha, but not being intolerant.

Rather than pursue this logic thread I'm going to leap ahead first to the core of what I want to explain, and then return to the first paragraph to further explore tolerance versus truth seeking.

You know the old sayings (usually said about love) regarding how can something so wrong "feel" "so right?" I am going to explain why faiths and "beliefs" that are factually incorrect 1) do have merits of validity and 2) "feel" so right.

No matter what culture one is from, what generation one was born into, raised and lived in, or whether one is young, old, rich, poor, believing or not, the fact is that the same God created the universe and all in it, created and raised humans from the animals by giving each person a soul at conception, and is present everywhere, All Knowing, even if no one is paying any attention to him in a particular place. So the same God is present and has always been present whether he is among believers or non-believers, whether God is overlooking a deserted island or the most crowded city. The same one God always has been and always will be. God's reality does not change at all whether people believe in him or not, or if people even exist.

We know this from the scripture. As God created all things, starting with heaven and the material universe, with the sky and earth, think about it... God's the same God even though people had not even been created yet. God's the same God before creation, on Day One of creation, on Day Two of creation and so forth, and he remains the same God as he creates human beings, as some believe in God and some don't, as many are faithful but some fall away, as many are unfaithful but some remain faithful: throughout all this God remains the same, as he does eternally. This is how to combine faith + logic to understand and draw the same conclusions as I have shown you how to do here, which is that by reading the scripture one learns the obvious that is not spelled out because it is obvious, which is that God's "reality" or "strength" did not grow (or diminish, or change in any way) whether he is overseeing the material things of the universe (rocks, plants, animals) or humans. The scriptures would have obviously pointed this out otherwise. God is understood with the very first words of scripture in the Bible (and the Qur'an) to have always been in existence, to be the source of everything, to be All Knowing, and to be constant and unchanging, regardless of one's vantage point in the universe or one's timeline. The same God created and watches some small piece of rock asteroid millions of miles away as he created and watches a large city of humans with all kinds of genuine faith or bogus "beliefs." The same God created and watches a tribe of indigenous people who may have had no contact with the Gospel, or the God of Abraham. So God is 1) the Creator 2) always aware and 3) always present, no matter what the place or circumstances.

How, then, is God present everywhere, regardless of the presence of people at all, or whether or not they are believers? God's Holy Spirit constantly moves and inspires in all places at all times throughout God's creation. So the Holy Spirit is as present over deserted landscapes as it is among populated areas, and the Holy Spirit is as present among believers as among non-believers, or of those who have genuine faith or those who have bogus beliefs. The presence of the Holy Spirit is the defacto status: it is not a "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval. The Holy Spirit is "there," just as oxygen is always "there," whether people are doing the right thing or not.

So when prehistoric people first started to have self awareness and wonder about the forces of nature and their place within it, the Holy Spirit was there before they started wondering, as they wondered and drew some conclusions, and remains there even if they have drawn false, and even horrifying, conclusions. For example the Holy Spirit obviously was present when indigenous tribes of Central and South America performed bloody human sacrifice because obviously the Holy Spirit does not abandon areas that fall into even the gravest of error. One could argue that the Holy Spirit works even harder to try to bring genuine and not false enlightenment. Likewise in even the most dreadful of enforced atheist countries, such as the USSR under Stalin, it's not like the Holy Spirit was never there or fled, anymore than people's guardian angels take a hike even if their human doesn't believe in them or behaves badly. Even the worst murderers still have their guardian angel to the end of that person's life. (Who wants that job hey? That's one of the differences between angels and humans, which is another reason that people who try to proclaim themselves angels are so pathetic).

But not to get off track with discussing angels, returning then to what I was speaking of, God is present everywhere all the time, regardless if humans are there or not, or whether they have proper belief or not. God's presence is not a reward or a seal of approval, but his being there is the defacto state of all of being, whether heavenly or material realm. The Holy Spirit is, for lack of a better term, the "observable" or "interactive" manifestation of God on earth. God, of course, is always directly approachable by each and every human being through prayer. God, however, tends to carry about individual and group agenda (for lack of a better word) through the Holy Spirit. This is why the Holy Spirit has been compared to and actually seen as the wind, a creature of the wind (the dove), water and fire because this accurately reflects that God is the source of all (the source of wind, doves, water and fire) and his influence that dwells unasked for among people is the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes people read the scriptures and get a little self righteous thinking that they invoke or receive the Holy Spirit due to their faith and goodness. Remember that Jesus sent the Holy Spirit, as he said he would, at Pentecost: the Apostles, Mary and the rest of the disciples did not "summon" the Holy Spirit or "earn" the Holy Spirit through deeds, birthright or other human conceptions of merit. The Holy Spirit is always everywhere on earth, whether it is asked for or not. It is another sign of the faithfulness of God even when humans are either oblivious to him or unfaithful to him in turn. Pentecost was the infusion of those present with the Holy Spirit. That does not mean the Holy Spirit was nowhere to be found in Jerusalem before Pentecost, ha. The Holy Spirit is always there, even where people do not exist, so most assuredly the Holy Spirit is there when people reach out to seek God, either incorrectly or correctly.

This, then, is my point about why even incredibly incorrect and unfactual "beliefs" can have some merits. By merits I mean points of validity and even virtues, but obviously those points of validity by no means guarantees or delivers salvation and eternal life. I am explaining this so that 1) those of you with faith in the one true God experience deepening of faith and understanding of God and 2) those of you with no or questionable beliefs can understand that a sprinkling of good things in a belief system does not salvation make.

The obvious example of what I am speaking about are the faiths and "beliefs" who value and seek peace. It is the influence of the Holy Spirit that draws even those people who do not believe in God, or who believe in false gods or worship principalities (such as natural forces or the supposed power of rites), to believe in peace. The Holy Spirit generates and maintains a yearning for good things-of truly good things-like peace among all humans. The danger is that without understanding the reality of God and the Holy Spirit, the objective and the framework for the structure of yearning, the motivations and the actions, and the desired outcome of the people yearning for peace can be all wrong and lead to the opposite, to destruction. Thus you have people who say things like "Buddhism is so peaceful and tolerant and so good, so it must be true." Well, there are two things true about Buddhism. One is that the Buddha existed and had an encounter with the Holy Spirit, but one that was without the context of belief in the one God. So the second true thing is that much of the goodness of behavior and philosophy advocated by genuine Buddhists is worthy and even inspired by contact with the Holy Spirit, but the objectives and the factual world view is off target due to the lack of recognition of the reality of the one God. Thus one can believe in a faith or a "belief" that has worthy and even inspired components while still faithfully following the wrong path because the facts are missing or incorrect.

While Pope Benedict XVI (writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) was not specifying Buddhism in this passage in his book "The Spirit of Liturgy" I include it here because it explains some of the problem that I am bringing to your attention in this blog posting.

"...then we can now define the intention of the account of creation as follows: creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man. The goal of creation is the covenant, the love story, of God and man...Only when man is in covenant with God does he become free. Only then are the equality and dignity of all men made manifest. If, then, everything is directed to the covenant, it is important to see that the covenant is a relationship: God's gift of himself to man, but also man's response to God...the fundamental process of salvation history, that is, the election and separation of pure from impure, and therefore the inauguration of the history of God's dealings with man. Thus begins the spiritual creation, the creation of the covenant, without which the created cosmos would be an empty shell...Now if worship, rightly understood, is the soul of the covenant, then it not only saves mankind but is also meant to draw the whole of reality into communion with God...True surrender to God...consists...in the union of man and creation with God. Belonging to God has nothing to do with destruction or non-being: it is rather a way of being" (p. 26-28).

Notice the part that I was thinking of when Pope Benedict writes that belonging to God (substitute "being spiritual" for those who deny God as he really is) consists of neither destruction nor non-being. In other words even peaceful detachment as a philosophy and a belief is damaging and erroneous, just as, obviously, destruction is an error. If one does not believe in God as he actually is one is not participating in creation the way God intended and as it factually is, which is the stage of an ongoing covenant with God, but one that does have a beginning and an end with each person's life and death:

"For Christian thinkers, the circle is seen as the great movement of the cosmos. The nature religions adn many non-Christian philosophies think of it as a movement of unceasing repetition...in the Christian view of the world, the many small circles of the lives of individuals are inscribed within the one great circle of history as it moves from exitus [departure] to reditus [return]...In these circles, the mystery of beginning is repeated again and again, but they are also the scene of the end of time, of a final collapse, which may in its own way prepare the ground for a new beginning...Cult, then, has to do with the movement turning around. It is the sudden awareness that one has fallen, like the prodigal son's remorse, when he looks back to where he has come from...The fascination with such views is very great; they seem so easily identifiable with the Christian message...The religions of the Far East have teh same basic pattern. That is why the various kinds of teaching on redemption that they offer seem highly plausible. Exercises for relaxing the body and emptying the mind are seen as the path to redemption. They aim at liberation at finitude, indeed, they momentarily anticipate that liberation and so have salvific power...[in contrast] Christian thought distinguishes the two movements [exitus [departure] reditus [return]] from one another. Exitus is not a fall from the infinite, the rupture of being adn thus the cause of all sorrow in the world. No, exitus is first and foremost something thoroughly positive. It is the Creator's free act of creation. It is his positive will that the created order should exist as something good in relation to himself, from which a response of freedom and love can be given back to him...It accepts a creation from God as his offer of love, and thus ensues a dialogue of love, that wholly new kind of unity that love alone can create. The being of the other is not absorbed or abolished, but rather, in giving itself, it becomes full itself. Here is a unity that is higher than the unity of indivisible elementary particles..." (p. 31-33).

Here is an analogy to help you to understand, though I think that Pope Benedict is so remarkably brilliant in his explanation here that few will miss his point. His focus, though, is on explaining the history of the relationship between God and his people in order to comment on the development of the liturgy, thus he was not authoring a description of the problem of "good ideas" in factually insufficient faiths and beliefs, as I am writing here. Thus the analogy will help.

God created Creation, the cosmos and all in it, including human beings, in order to have a loving relationship in covenant with human beings as a whole, and individually. This relationship has a beginning (the birth of the person) and an end, which is initiated by the death of the person and then their judgment of where he or she will spend their eternal life, in heaven, or not. As a whole there is also going to be an ending to the entire covenant at the end of time, when the world passes away, the living and the dead are judged, and the heavenly Jerusalem is brought into being. So my analogy is that each person's life is like a single telephone conversation between two persons, in this case the human person and God. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end is not really an end because at the end of the conversation the person gets up, leaves their home, walks to God's home and knocks on the door. The person will either be let in or not, and if not will be exiled for eternity in a godless and tormented place.

Now, the conversation can going in many directions and different people have different conversations. It may start out nice but develop into a quarrel. People might hang up the phone on God but then call him back. People might say unworthy things on the phone, or they may only say nice things. Think of it as a play where there may be many scenes and events, but ultimately the play, ie. the conversation, does come to an end.

Christians, Jews and Muslims have this worldview, this true understanding of God, that creation and life is the stage for this one conversation with God, one that has a beginning and an end, and the result of it will be that when one knocks on God's door in person, God will either bring him or her into eternal life in his presence and bliss, or due to their own rejection, sin, injustice or faithlessness, cast them eternally out of his presence.

Faiths and "beliefs" that do not understand this essential try to control the conversation's content for "goodness" or "peacefulness," without understanding that one is in a conversation with God and that this conversation will be followed up by a one-way encounter at death when one knocks at God's door. Thus practices like being peaceful, non-violent, not stepping on little bugs when one walks, detaching from interest in the material things of the world, working through a list of activities that presumably gives advantage in a theoretical, but bogus, future life and incarnation all sound "good" and their spirit may be wholesome in original intent, but they miss the entire point of life, miss the realization that it is all a one-on-one phone call with God, and miss that there is only one door out of life and it leads to God's reality and his front steps.

This is the futility of incorrect beliefs that have good merits. One can talk endlessly about peacefulness and love, but have no idea that God is on the other end of the line and thus waste the entire conversation. Instead of talking about peace in the abstract one should have been paying attention to God in the reality. It's like if you had a conversation with the President of the United States about the health care bill and all you talked about with him is what you saw on the soap opera yesterday. Good use of time? Practical pursuit of worthy goals? Not really. Again, I'm using simple analogies to help understand why something that may "feel" logical and "good" can be so misguided and futile.

Worse, when one is focused on detaching from the world and not believing in the one way street to God, that is like you are constantly trying to hang up the phone. As Pope Benedict explains so well, creation is not the result of the fall, or a futile recycling (my words there); creation is the place that God established in order to have a loving relationship based on a covenant with humankind. It has a purpose and an exit point, even though much of life overall feels iterative as each generation faces the same joys and sorrows, ease or difficulties, as previous ones, but here is the point: It feels iterative but it is not because it is one covenant between one God and all humans, and each human being has their own "phone conversation" with God, the end of which consists of going to God's door and being allowed in or cast down into the netherworld eternally.

I really don't know what to make of the recent generations fascination with tools and techniques that detach themselves from God and his goodness rather than as they believe genuinely increase their presumed "spirituality." One reason I have not criticized my ersatz supposed friends in the past who had these beliefs (including my own niece and others) is that I trust the Holy Spirit who constantly moves among people to bring them to the truth, painful as it may be when one has been so mislead and misleading others. But in private I have been sad to see many people hang up the phone to God or blather their own self focused rubbish on the line, knowing that in the end God will have to say to them "I did not know you."

Sadly, God has generations of experience at of course having to say that to people who believe they mouthed all the right words during life, they were "tolerant," they were "peaceful," they "gave to good causes," they "detached themselves from the evils of the material world..." and then, ooops, you see, that is the problem. The world is not evil, it is the loving home that God created for his loving relationship and covenant with humans. And further, they wasted their entire lives not once acknowledging God on the other end of the line.

So that is why incorrect faiths and "beliefs" can have some merits as in valid thinking, valid philosophies, and even inspired goodness, yet still be factually incorrect. The faith or belief fathers or mothers felt the presence and inspiration of the Holy Spirit but rather than taking it all the way to recognizing God and his covenant, they tried to imitate traits of what they perceived the Holy Spirit to be. At best it is well meaning people who totally miss the point of creation which is to be in loving covenant with a real and active God. At worst it becomes cult where ritual, tech and even abhorrent practices (human sacrifice, blood drinking, etc) are viewed as acceptable and even admirable means to some sort of "greater purpose," but that purpose and that play and that conversation are all made up and bogus self delusion.

You know how many people have dreams where they are back in school again but they have missed showing up for a school exam? It's a classic anxiety dream. Well, people who do not believe in God as he actually is, no matter how nice and "well meaning" they are have missed the entire conversation, the entire classroom, even showing up for school, say nothing of missing the school exam. The Holy Spirit worked to keep yearning for God alive in even the most soul deadening places such as Stalin's Soviet Union. How baffling is it that many faiths and "beliefs" try to deaden awareness of God and his covenant in places where there is absolutely no excuse for doing so.

That is why traditional faiths must be respected, such as Buddhism, because the Buddha and his followers did with good intention seek if not the face of God then the influence of the Holy Spirit, who was always present, even if they did not realize so. But modern variations on these faiths and synthesized "beliefs" are totally bogus and dangerous because they are not at all working within the piece, however small, of the valid Holy Spirit that the faith ancestors did but rather since they do not recognize God as he actually is, yet they have access to knowledge (it's not like they were raised under a rock and never heard of the Bible, Torah or the Qur'an), they create self serving delusion models of a mechanized cosmos, not matter how many loving, peaceful and tolerant, benevolent vocabulary they hide behind. They do not do credit to their faith ancestors who were either of the mainstream believing faiths or those who, like Buddhism, with good intentions, created worldviews based on legitimate input from the Holy Spirit, even though they lacked the context.

I hope this helps. I have to wrap it here because I'm a housekeeper and my boss is wondering where to best display on the living roomwall his blowgun while waving it around and telling me to bend over. *sigh* Kind a distraction from thinking about God and giving spiritual direction.

Understanding God: His "emotions"

God does not have emotions in the way that humans think of emotions, where emotions are defined as strong feelings. God has what one needs to think of as perfect appropriate responses to human activities. God is beyond complete understanding, but it is important that you be on the right path toward understanding him truthfully, rather than think you understand him and are on a completely wrong path of supposed insight. So I thought of this analogy (of course!)

When I say that God has "perfect appropriate responses" this is what I am trying to say. Since God is total perfection, his "emotional" response to anything that a human does (or anything else) is perfect for the situation. God "feels" only what is entirely truthful and authentic and correct to feel, regardless of the situation, since obviously there is no situation in heaven or in the God created universe, all of which were created by God, that he does not already have complete insight regarding. Thus God has "emotions" that humans sometimes observe, but what they are is the perfect appropriate response that God give to a situation, even if the humans who observe God's response don't fully understand it. But do not kid yourselves. If you read the scriptures you will notice that people are rarely actually "puzzled" or "dumbfounded" by God's reactions... people can pretty much understand in advance when God is wrathful or when God is pleased, since Biblical people pretty much knew full well what to expect. So here is the analogy I thought of to help modern people understand God's "feelings" better.

Suppose that you lived in a city that had one courthouse and one judge, and that judge always rendered perfect justice. In other words, the judge never made a mistake in any case brought before him. Here's how to understand God's wrath. Imagine that a person drags an innocent person off the street, into the courthouse, and right in front of the judge shoots the innocent person dead. The judge would be wrathful but not with the tinges of human anger. That perfect judge, who has already rendered perfect judgment to all types of cases would not be, like a human, "angry," "shocked," or "scared." The judge's reaction would be wrath. Wrath is also called "righteous anger," because it is a combination of indignation at unjust behavior combined with the perfect comprehension of what happened, all the implications and having the perfect "final say" in what happens to punish that person.

Because God is all knowing, whenever a person sins or is unjust, it is as if that sinning or unjust person dragged a innocent person in front of God the judge and shot the person, and one better be prepared for God's wrath, either immediately (on the spot justice, which means during one's life) or deferred wrath (which means upon the person's death and judgment).

So that is how to understand in Biblical times and in present times God's "anger," which is really wrath. It means that it is punishment time, either immediate or delayed, for the sins and injustice that God, as judge, always observes since he is all knowing. People who think God does not see and know all sins and all injustice are like the person in the analogy who drags an innocent person before the perfect judge and shoots him right in his presence, doing so either for shock effect, terrorism, or because he actually thinks he is better than the judge and is showing the judge "how to get things done." God is always present and God already knows all the circumstances around every thought and deed of humans, and thus there is no defiance or shock value one can manipulate before God. Further, God, like the judge in the analogy, is going to render perfect justice regardless if the crime is done in an anger inducing way by a human or not.

When you understand that, you can more fully appreciate how often God holds back his wrath, deferring it, allowing some time (but not as much as you think) for repentance and conversion of the heart and soul back to God. You also can understand why God "doesn't seem angry" because "he allows the wicked to flourish," but then those wicked find out just how "angry" God "really is" because they all wake up in hell when they die.

So God does not get "angry" like humans do for imagined or real slights, out of fear or shock, or vengeance, or jealousy, or even what some imagine to be good reasons to be angry (like being in war, for example). God is only "angry" when a person sins or is unjust (and that includes sins of neglect, meaning they are not doing the honorable things in service to God and in charity that they should be doing.)

You can also use this analogy to understand how God can be "sad," "grieved," be "aggrieved" or have a "grievance." You see how flexible the root concept of grief/grievance is, because it means both grief as in sadness, and grievance as in having a complaint. Complaint is a similar word, where one may complain over an inconvenience, but to be "plaintive" is to be sad (as in plaintive music). God cannot be sad in the way that humans are because humans are sad when they are in a situation that cannot be changed, while God is the source of all help and so he is never in a situation he cannot "change." So God can grieve but he is not sad. Here's how to use the analogy to understand it.

Suppose that after the shooting is done in the analogy courtroom, the bystanders suddenly realize that the innocent person who was dragged in front of the judge and shot was the child of the judge himself. A human judge would of course feel unbelievable sadness and grief at having his child murdered in front of him, because that child is now dead and gone. God, though, receives that child "on the other side," in heaven, and thus God is not sad the way the human judge would be because God "fixes it." God is not stuck with being "without" the child because of course the child is now in heaven. The human judge would be remaining stuck in sadness, however, because he is now without his beloved child. So for a human sadness is added to anger, while for God sadness is not added to his righteous wrath.

However, both God and the human judge in the analogy would both feel grief. How to understand grief? Grief is what happens when one has to now tell the grandparents, the mother, the siblings, the cousins, and the friends that the child has been killed. Grief is seeing the sadness that others must endure because of that action. This is why St Paul in Ephesians warns not to grieve the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not made sad, but feels grief.

Now, to expand on the analogy to better understand God and especially grief, which he manifests, for lack of a better word, through the Holy Spirit. Suppose the innocent person who was murdered was not a child and perhaps not even a good person. Suppose the innocent person was a sinner or an evil doer, or an unbeliever. God would still feel grief for that person even though that person does not count among those who are saved and going to heaven. Why? Because only God takes no joy in injustice, whether against good people or "bad" people because it tarnishes in the darkness of sin both the person who performs the injustice and it cuts short the chance for the so called "bad" person to be redeemed. I say "only God" because just about every person I know succumbs to temptation to gloat at injustice if that injustice happens to someone "who deserves it." Some of the most unspiritual people I know like to post "karma is a bitch," because they are already gloating at a hopeful injustice happening in the future to catch up with an unjust person. In other words, the Bible warns that one will "reap what one sows," but that is different from an almost pagan hope that something bad will "happen" in the future, unrelated, to "make up for" something "bad" the person did in the past. That is trying to justify injustice with another injustice, a very unspiritual and incorrect take on reaping what one sows.

Anyway, remember, God knows the future, not only what will happen but all that could have happened. God knows if, for example, the innocent but sinful person who was killed in that analogy would have someday repented his or her ways and had been converted in heart and saved. But due to the injustice of the murderer that person's life ended and he or she receives perfect judgment, resulting in hell, if that be the case. The Holy Spirit grieves 1) at any injustice because it is against the good ways of God that God has enjoined upon humans 2) at the person who is not saved and goes to hell and 3) at the besmirching of the soul of the person who perpetrates the injustice. The Holy Spirit is not "sad" because as I said, God dispenses all perfect justice (both comfort and punishment) and thus is not ever in the helpless situation of sadness. The Holy Spirit of God does, most assuredly, feel deep grief (hence reference in scripture to the groaning of the Holy Spirit). It is not "sadness," it is grief... grief at the wrong road taken by humans, grief at the dirtying of their own and others' souls by humans, and grief at the unnecessary and avoidable chastisement that humans who perform and/or enable injustice must endure.

I hope that you have found this useful to think about and ponder. You can think of God's perspective of "joy" and "satisfaction" also in the way that "sadness" and "grief" were analyzed. Because God is the source of all joy and satisfaction, he does not feel per se those feelings which depend on fluxuating circumstances and processes required to reach those feelings which God already is (not "has" but "is"), but he does feel them, like grief, on behalf of humans in various situations. The one exception is creation, which God as Creator feels indeed as pure satisfaction, not self-satisfied the way humans are, but when God creates because all is good, and thus God is pleased with that. This is why God is able to appreciate a beautiful sunset alongside humans but of course from his perspective of its goodness, not only the aesthetics.

I just thought of a quick way artists can relate. Think of your favorite work of art and the time, either short or long, it took you to develop it. Part of your satisfaction with it is not just the aesthetics of it, which pleases you, but the method and time by which you achieved it. God created the entire universe with less than a sentence of speech, ha, so you can understand how God's aesthetic appreciation is pure as it is centered on its goodness, and not in the effort or cleverness or talent that went into its making. God didn't have to "work hard" to "paint" a perfect sunset. I hope that helps you understand! And "Hi" and "hey" to all the young people. God is not emo :-)

Both God and Jesus have roles in judgement

I've noticed there is some confusion among some people based on the completeness of the authority given to Jesus by God to judge all of humankind. Here is a quick way to help you to understand precisely what God does and intends.

Yes, Jesus has complete authority to judge, which he will do at the Second Coming. The Book of Revelation explains that through the eyes of the Apostle John, who is taken to heaven in vision to see some of what will happen in the final days leading up to the Apocalypse and Christ's Return. God remains on his heavenly throne while the world passes away and Jesus judges all, the living and the dead.

However, until that time comes, people have individual lives and they live and they die. Each person is judged on their death by God himself. How do we know this? Again, turn to what seems to be my most cited scripture, Luke 16, where Jesus describes what happens to a rich man who goes to hell.

"There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day. And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores...When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried, and from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he cried out, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames" (Luke 16:19-20, 22-24).

Now, remember that Jesus has a greater point to make in telling this story, this actual event that has happened, so you must read it for both 1) the main point and 2) any other insight one can glean since everything that Jesus said is saying it "as it really is."

Notice that the rich man does not say, "Abraham! HEY! What in the world am I doing in hell? I was a great guy!" The rich man knows exactly why he is there so he does not bother to ask for an explanation, which he already knows (and in fact is gazing on the very reason, his neglect of the poor, suffering and dying Lazarus). This is because God judged that man as he woke up in hell. It's not like there's a kind of courtroom or waiting room where God calls people in and judges each one in a neutral spot in turn. One wakes up from death in the place where one is sent, with the knowledge of God's judgement. Period. The angels escorted the poor man Lazarus, carrying him to heaven. God's judgment was apparent by the fact the angels were taking him to heaven. Likewise God's judgement was apparent and the facts about "why" given into the spiritual heart and mind of the person who ends up in hell. So the first thing that careful reading and trusting that Jesus is precise and truthful and complete in all things reveals is that people die and wake up in either heaven or hell, knowing exactly why they are there, which only God can provide.

The second thing you notice is that Jesus did not say at any point that he, Jesus, was the one who judged Lazarus or the rich man. If that were the case he would have said so, since Jesus' complete ministry is to be open, freely sharing the facts of the Kingdom of God, and he would have told the disciples if he, Jesus, were the one who was already judging each person who died, even before he was alive as Son of Man on earth and before his crucifixion and resurrection. That would have been an extremely important fact to share in the Gospel and Jesus would have done so if that were the case. Indeed, it would have been mind boggling for the disciples to hear that even before Jesus was born to Mary on earth that he was in heaven judging each person who died! So even though Jesus is of course of God and thus eternal, when he speaks of his role of judge and authority to judge whether one goes to heaven or hell he means at the Second Coming.

So when Abraham explains why the rich man cannot have a drop of water, Abraham is not breaking the news to him about why he is in hell, Abraham is explaining the unchangeable rules and conditions, that no aid or comfort will be given to those in hell.

"Abraham replied, 'My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented. Moreover, between us a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours" (Luke 16:25-6).

Do you see? If Jesus had judged the rich man, Jesus would have told the disciples that "And I told him during judgement exactly how many times he had ridden past the poor bleeding hungry and dying Lazarus while riding on his horse and then I had told him each and every one of his sins and that's why he's in hell." But Jesus did not do that....God himself did that. Another way that you can understand that it was God and not pre-born Jesus doing the judging is that Jesus mentions that angels carried the poor man Lazarus to heaven, and everyone realizes that God sends angels to do his bidding. For example, when Jesus is praying before the betrayal in Gethsemane, God sends an angel to comfort him; Jesus does not summon angels. He could do so but he never did so, as Jesus and God work in harmony in all things. It is in the Second Coming where Jesus sends angels and judges. Until then it is exactly as it has always been, which is that God himself renders personal individual judgment and the sending of a soul to heaven or hell upon that person's death.

So to continue the reading, the rich man now asks for permission to send Lazarus (and can you see that he still does not "get it," I mean, he's in hell for how he neglected Lazarus in the first place and he's still trying to order Lazarus to go on his errands... the road to hell is pride, pride, pride...) to warn his brothers. Again, if you carefully read this you can glean an important insight. The rich man is not so much wanting to share the sins that got him into hell, but, and this is important, he wants to tell his brothers how bad and final the suffering of hell is!

"He said, 'Then I beg you, father, send him [Lazarus] to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment'" (Luke 16:27).

See? It is the horror of hell in its actuality that spurs the rich man to want to warn his brothers. It's not a genuine repentance since he is still trying to get the very poor miserable "beneath his notice" Lazarus, even as he's glorified to heaven, to go back to earth and do his bidding! So it's not like the rich man didn't "realize" "why" he was in hell since he wasn't judged until Abraham "explained" it to him: he knew full well all along since the story does not start out with "Hey! What's that poor bum Lazarus doing in heaven while I've found myself in hell? What gives?" He immediately hits up Lazarus, through Abraham, for a drop of water. This is how you can infer from what Jesus relates are the facts that people are transported, waking up to find themselves in either heaven or hell with full understanding of how and why they were judged to go there by God. Jesus tells the disciples this actual portrayal of heaven and hell and two people who go to their judgement respectively to make the broader point about what God expects regarding charity, but also to explain how the reality of heaven and hell "works." This is why Abraham explained not only the "why" of why he would not given the rich man even a drop of water or send warning to living five brothers, but also the mechanism, the physics, of heaven and hell, where the great chasm prevents any crossing in either direction. So Jesus was providing a moral and lesson in the telling of what actually happened in this case of the judgment of two men, but also describing for the disciples, who of course needed to know, how the reality of hell and the divide between heaven and hell "works."

Since that is Jesus' intention, if Jesus were "already" judging individual human beings upon their death, he would have said so. To use the expression "it goes without saying" that the disciples understood that God had simultaneously rendered/conveyed judgment to each person and had them conveyed to their place of eternity, either heaven or, of course, hell.

So yes, Jesus has all authority and he will Judge. But do not fall into the trap of thinking that upon personal death (not the End of Days when all will die and rise again for judgement) that when one dies one goes into kind of a waiting room area where one can argue one's case in front of stereotype "forgiving and easy going" Jesus. One is BANG! in heaven or hell, receiving simultaneously judgement and full knowledge of the why's from God himself. Simultaneous with being conveyed by the angels to heaven Lazarus would have received the light of God praising him for his belief and comforting him for his suffering with reward in heaven. Simultaneous with waking up in hell, the rich man would have received full knowledge of the why's of his condemnation and judging by God, which we know because as Jesus relates, it's not like the rich man was puzzled at seeing that "loser" Lazarus in heaven with Abraham. No dialogue is wasted in him asking why that is, because he wakes in hell fully knowing how and why God judged him. No, he's just shocked at how truly unbearable, unrelievable and eternal that hell actually is. It is that shock of suffering that makes him want to warn his brothers that ignoring that dirtbag Lazarus and other poor losers like him is a bad idea. In other words, by how the dialogue progresses you can see that if hell were in theory not such a bad place, but not heaven, this guy would never have bothered trying to warn his brothers, since he still doesn't "get" how unrighteous and unjust he was to Lazarus through his neglect. He's solely motivated by how dreadful that hell is and how he truly can't order the peasant around to do his bidding like he did on earth.

That's why, to remind you of a few postings ago, pride is the downfall of MANY who go to hell. Pridefulness, especially putting one's self before God's priorities, IS a grievous sin and merits hell, regardless of the other "good deeds" or whatever.

When one decides that Jesus is one's Lord and Savior, it is not so you can show a membership card to Jesus, because he's not the one checking at the door upon death: it's God. This is why Jesus repeatedly explains he is the "way." Jesus is not saying that he is judging people's entry into heaven. Remember when James and John's mother asked Jesus if he would have them sit at his right and left hand in his kingdom? What did Jesus say? He said that was up to God. Jesus promised them to go prepare the places for them in heaven. Jesus did not say that he would be the judge when they die. Jesus is the way in the sense that if one trusts him to not only save but to be LORD over one's life, then one will pass judgement from God. It is at the End of all Days, at the Apocalypse, at the Second Coming, that all who lived and died in all humanity will resurrect and be judged by Jesus. Until that time each individual person's death and rendering of judgement to heaven or hell is in God the Father's hands.

Finally, another way you can understand this is to recall one of the most insightful, but most subtle and unnoticed, of all the writings of St. Paul.

And do not grieve the holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption (Ephesians 4:30).

You see? Here Paul is reminding the readers that the Holy Spirit also partakes in the final judgement! What he is basically saying that if Christians are "All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling...along with all malice" (Ephesians 4:30-31) then these Christians risk losing, by giving sadness and grief to the Holy Spirit, the seal which will get them redeemed. This is powerful and serious stuff, people. Again, this is why I must caution you not to allow a kind of video image of Jesus in the waiting room giving easy judgement upon a person's death to delude you that it's not something that can't be lost. One can accept Jesus as one's Savior but if one does not also follow completely his "way" and indeed, going further, grieves the Holy Spirit, if Jesus is not truly Lord, then one is not prepared to be judged favorably by God, who does the judging based on 1) one's belief and 2) one's righteousness, through the guidance and filter of both Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Paul is warning good believers of the early Christian community that they can lose the seal of redemption if they grieve the Holy Spirit through the actions as listed above.

More about understanding God

So here are some thoughts as helpful follow up to what you read previously about understanding and explaining God's All Knowingness.

If you really understood the imagery regarding God's All Knowingness that I used in order to describe God, and really work with the comprehension and illumination it provides, you should have two simultaneous reactions. One is to be completely boggled by the awesomeness and completeness of God. When you understand that he simultaneously and at all times knows all that there is to know, including the history through eternity of even the smallest quantity of vacuum, nothingness, in the universe, and all that could ever befall it, you have to be totally boggled by the immensity, perfection and completion of God. However, you should also have a simultaneous feeling of "click," of a light bulb lighting, of dawning understanding, a relief that you finally "get" what God is really all about. At the same time that God is revealed as truly all that ever can be or will be, to a level of detail and completion that no angel or human can understand, you should also feel that at last you DO understand a very important part of God, and thus he is, in an almost paradoxical way, more approachable to you personally.

By chipping off this individual insight about God, really understanding his All Knowingness, you receive cascading benefits of illumination and comprehension about him. For one, you lose that mindless, amorphous, fuzzy wuzzy temptation to believe that he's a name, a personification, given to some "universal force." That, you now understand, is total rubbish, because God is the creator and outside of the universe itself, and so the universe's matter and "energy forces" cannot at all be compared to him, and also you realize that any "energy forces" that do exist, and are not bogus human imaginings, fall under God's creative actions and his control anyway. Secondly, you realize that God is indeed a "person" and not some goopy syrup of "vibes" or "energy." God is not a name given to forces that just kind of churn around in a mosh pit of "energy" and "vibrations"... God is a personage, someone who is totally mindful and in control of all that was and ever will be.

By understanding the extraordinary and indescribable scope of God's All Knowingness, you also understand that God can be described as having three basic "activities," very broadly speaking. Again, I'm trying to help by putting them in human context. One is that God creates and then lets creation (and subsequent maintenance and ongoingness of his creation) proceed according to natural laws he has put into place, such as gravity, biology, geology, etc all reveal. So God creates and when he creates he also creates the natural laws that then are the ongoing mechanisms put into place. An obvious example is reproduction, where after creating life, the natural laws and processes that God has put into place allows plant and animal species to reproduce on their own: God does not have to intervene.

The second "activity" that God "spends time doing" is, thus, intervention. God rarely intervenes in the way that most of you think about, such as miracles, smiting evil doers, and/or temporarily suspending natural laws. However, God is constantly intervening in two ways. God is constantly available to have a relationship with any individual person and will respond to prayers, though not always in a way that one expects or can perceive. God is also constantly working on the heart and soul of every person, even those who hate him, through the presence and invitation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is always there, moving among even the most arid and hateful of people and communities, and even among the worse sinners, trying to reach them and bring them back to genuine humanity, charity, self respect, and relationship with God. This is why you cannot really claim a faith or religion is either "unfair" or "the only way" because its believers believe that only through their rites etc will they be saved by God or whatever. In many ways it is a moot point because God does seek individual relationship and the Holy Spirit does indeed move even in Communist atheist countries, as we have seen in history. However, one must always, as I've boggled before, seek the truth, not the "right" or "best" "faith." If you seek the truth you find it, because God is the truth. False religions and faith put a checkered flag in front of you too soon, so that you think you have found the "right" or "best" "faith," before you have really completed (or even sincerely started) the search and discernment of the truth about God.

For example, it became an anti-establishment fad in the 1960's and continuing today to rebel against the "irrelevant" and "boring" and "hypocritical" faith of one's parents. Now, I'm speaking of the mainstream monotheistic faiths, primarily Judaism and Christianity. Islam has thus far not suffered from the throwing away of the parents' faith by the children just because the children want to sin and feel all grown up and rebel "against the machine" of religion. But for forty years Jewish kids and Christian kids grew up to be denomination switching, converting, God denying, or pagan faith pursuing rebels who think they are smarter than their boring and sheep like parents. Ooops. Why is that an ooops? This is where God's All Knowingness is so important to understand.

How can any one person decide to rebel or religion "shop" if they really understood God's All Knowingness first? One really has to come to know God within one's own family mainstream and orthodox faith FIRST before becoming any sort of religion critic. This is because all the mainstream, orthodox Monotheistic faiths are founded on truths of communication between the one true God and his people, which is why they are described as the offsprings of Abraham. Here's a modern analogy. Suppose you really want to get to know all about a celebrity who you admire. But you decide to throw away thousands of years of dialogue that your ancestors have had with this celebrity, because you want to find the place where you supposedly can really get to know him. I mean, think about it, that's so absurd. But that is what two to three generations of rebellious religion "shoppers" have done, and are still doing.

So when you understand God's All Knowingness and perfection of totality and completeness, and you understand both his creation/let it be role and his role of personal intervention, you realize that the Bible, the Qur'an, and the writings of many orthodox rabbis throughout history is actual records of that "celebrity" that you want to know: and your parents' mainstream faith records their share of understanding the actual God. You should fully respect and immerse yourself in your mainstream orthodox Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith first before seeking "additional" information and most certainly before diving into the rites of other faiths. I mean, if you don't understand the full purpose and relationship of your own faith first, how do you recognize, supposedly, a "better" faith? Duh. :-)

And finally, by understanding God's All Knowingness, you understand the third activity that God engages in which is to be in fellowship with the angels, the humans, and all creation. I don't mean this in the fuzzy wuzzy "they are all one in the ether" kind of creepy New Age thinking. I mean God, as a personage, "hangs out" with the angels, with humans, and with the living things, and the inorganic things, of the universe. It's one of the first things humans learn about God, what God is "like," in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, that God would walk in the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve, in the coolness of the evening. [God doesn't get too "hot" or "cold" so one is supposed to understand that God is hanging out with Adam and Eve at the time of day they would most enjoy, doing what many humans do, which is to walk around the yard, or the garden, or sit on the porch, at the end of day.] This is how we know, in addition to other scriptural references, that God spends much of his "time" just being in companionship with the beings he created, and the places that he created.

Just to wrap up this segment of posting about understanding God's All Knowingness, here is another insight that such analogies and knowledge about God should be giving you. Now you understand how even non-believers and people who do some pretty bad things can feel "blessed" and have what they think are "good lives," because while they are alive, they are swept along on the tide of goodness that God has set into motion for everyone. In other words, the rats benefit from being on the good ship. But when the ship goes aground, as it must someday do, either on an individual basis, or a culture or a nation, or totally, at the End of Time, or at a person's death and individual judgment, they realize they were riding the coattails of God's overall blessings and providence, but were doing so as rats rather than good stewards and believers. When one understands God's All Knowingness, you better understand why it seems that bad people get away with a lot, and even have "good lives," but they do not, as God knows the actions of every particle or vacuum that ever was or could be. Their judgment will be full and complete, when it is their time.

However, in this blogging I want to keep you focused on the joyful search for understanding the true God as he has already repeatedly revealed himself as he alone chooses to, so I don't want to close with just that warning above. Those of you who believe in God, or who were deprived of faith, or given false examples to follow, will benefit greatly by taking the first step of understanding that God is truly All Knowing and in control, in the ways that I've described above, as explained in Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy scripture. When an auto accident happens, God is in control because he established the laws of physics where energy and matter react, and humans decide if their use is for goodness or for not so good. Also, humans are flawed vessels, through both their physical limitations and their ignorance or vanity, so they cannot expect to live within a universe of natural laws but act like they are superhuman beings. Every child figures that out when he or she first decides he or she is like superman and then jumps off their garage (a childhood friend of mine did that and got the expected broken leg). Adults need to understand that God is in control through the natural laws he established in his creation, but that adults should not be puffed up about their role. Where they should feel pride is as St. Paul described, pride in Jesus Christ, pride in being brought to God within Jesus Christ, not through their own works or their imagined superhuman powers.

Rather, one needs to have comfort and consolation and understanding that even as God Knows All, he still desires and puts forth the Holy Spirit to help in this, fellowship and parenthood of all humans, bringing them, those that are worthy and just, into the companionship where God is all the time, which are the angels in heaven. God wants to walk with each human in what remains of the Garden on earth, but he will only do so if you truly seek him, not a fraud. God knows every particle and every non-particle that ever was and ever could be... if you understand that and come to accept that knowledge joyfully, that becomes a key part of your foundation of faith and trust in God. I've observed that humans find it difficult to trust God and have faith in him in large part because they continue to not understand the full dimensions of his All Knowingness, and the categories of his involvement, as I've described here. Evangelicals often leap too quickly into telling people to trust God without helping their followers to understand the fullness of God's "dimensions" and thus his trustworthiness. That is why the prophets before Jesus, and then culminating in Jesus himself, performed awesome miracles, as through observation of those powers that could only be God given, people mutually trusted the prophets but also grew in their trust of God, knowing intuitively how only the All Knowing can do those miraculous things that they saw.

I hope you have found this helpful and a special hello, as always, to the young people out there.

Bible Reading: Acts 8:18-23

But when Simon [a man who had been practising sorcery but came to be impressed by Peter and was baptized] saw that the Holy Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money, saying, "Give me also this power, so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit."

But Peter said to him, "Thy money go to destruction with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God could be purchased with money. Thou hast no part or lot in this matter; for thy heart is not right before God. Repent therefore this wickedness of thine and pray to God, that perhaps this thought of thy heart may be forgiven thee; for I see thou art in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity" (Acts 8:18-23).

Being impressed by God

This is another in my "understanding God" series, with particular attention to God's All Knowingness. Now, I've already used the basic principle of the example I'm going to present to you here, but I think that it is so important and powerful to you to understand that I'm giving you a variation.

But first, I'm going to explain my title, about "being impressed by God." We live in a media and "impact" obsessed modern society. The television program "Saturday Night Live" spoofed this with a series of skits called "Impress Ed Asner." The actual actor, Ed Asner, would sit there and rate various goofy people do funny or disgusting things, to see if he was impressed.

Well, if one really understands the All Knowingness of God, you will definitely be impressed with him. Young people, this is why I think of these examples with you in mind, since you've been raised by your parents and teachers to be good consumers, being impressed with products that you will spend money for. Likewise, you have grown up in a high tech age and so you have a built in tendency to look at everything to assess its functionality, and then decide if you are impressed. This is not a criticism of you, but of course, as you know, I think that being raised that way has lost for you a lot of the genuine mystery and wonderment of life, including, especially, of God. So here is another of my examples of the All Knowingness of God.

A few minutes ago, just before I sat back down in front of the computer, I went into the kitchen and filled my beverage glass (a genuine Coca Cola 75Th anniversary edition, LOL) with ice from the freezer, and then Coca Cola from the bottle I just bought today. I then took my first sip from that glass.

So here is a sample of God's All Knowingness. As I hold the glass, God could tell you all about every subatomic particle that makes up that glass: how many they are, what they are like, and where they came from. So just to select one subatomic particle in that glass, God could tell you when and how that subatomic particle came into being, and where it has been and where it traveled, and what function that particle performed at all points in time. God could then tell you where that subatomic particle, and remember, all of its millions of fellow particles, will go to next, and next and next, all the way to the end of time and space. In other words, God knows what will happen to that glass in the future, even though I do not know yet myself. Will I sell it, keep it, will it be around for a long time, or accidentally broken and then discarded? Whatever happens to it God not only knows where it and all its tiny subatomic particles will be, God also knows all the "could have beens." In other words, God knows what I, and then later other people, will do with that Coca Cola glass, and when its broken or lost what becomes of the particles as they break down and degrade, BUT God ALSO knows all the "alternative futures" if I did otherwise than I will do. In other words, God knows that, for example, I might keep that glass for many years, but he also knows what would have but will not happen to that glass if I gave it to a friend or threw it away, or lost it.

Just so you are not confused, I'm not saying that there are "alternative futures," which is a popular fantasy in science fiction genre of entertainment. There is only one future, because that is the reality of what actually happens. "The future" is reality as it unfolds, as the result of many decisions people make. People do not "change the future." The future is always exactly the same as the Present, since the future is what is happening at the moment in reality. In other words, the definition of "the future" is "the current day reality that has not yet happened."

Today and all the things you did today was as recently as yesterday, "the future." But it doesn't feel like "the future," since it was "today." The future is simply every "today" that has not yet occurred. It's kind of boring but accurate to think of it that way. So God knows in advance what every "today" will be in reality, to the smallest imaginable detail....

However, God is also so amazing that he could tell you what it would have been like if different types of "today" happened in the future. Let's give an example. Today is nearly over with, as I'm typing this in early evening, and so I can type with pretty good confidence that there was not an asteroid that hit the earth today. There's a lot of discussion about the lunar probe that will be crash landed into the moon tomorrow to look for water there. But if one of you were chatting with God, you could say to him, "What if an asteroid had hit the earth today? What would have happened?" God could tell you in all the detail (like in our example, down to each subatomic particle) of what would have been the results of such an event that did not, actually, take place.

How does God do it? How is he capable of telling people, if they were to have such a conversation with him, not only every detail of what will happen, but answer even strange "what if" type of future questions? Here's how you can understand it using some modern analogies.

Most people understand that in business people often do trend analysis. In other words, if data seems to trend in a certain direction, they can, based on experience, guesstimate where the data will move next. God does not have to guess because he knows exactly what reaction results from each action. So God would be able to tell you, in that "what if" scenario, what matter and what energy would react, in the "what if" asteroid collision, down to the smallest detail, such as, as we are discussing, the subatomic particles. So God does not have to "trend line," because God knows what each and every real reaction would be to each and every change... and he knows it all at once, all the time, for any and all times in the past, present and future, and even beyond the end of the universe and time, matter and energy at all (which is the realm of heaven).

So God could tell you what will happen to every subatomic particle in my Coca Cola glass in reality, as it really will occur in the future, and he could also tell you what would have happened "instead" if you came up with a hypothetical change to what has actually happened and what actually will happen. He could tell you the answer to silly questions, like what if human beings still had fur, or if they could flap their wings and fly. God could detail for you exactly what would have happened if that had been the reality.

For example, a lot of entertainers like to produce works based on "what if Hitler had won the war?" Well, God could tell you exactly what "would have happened," down to every subatomic particle (and beyond, since God knows even what is happening in the absence of matter), but God would remind you that he also, of course, knows, and has known all along, what would indeed in fact happen. He could educate and amuse you with answering your questions about "what if," but that's all it would be, since God knows the reality of what each future "today" will be: the sum total of all that actually is happening and will happen.

Now, even to marvel that God is like an amazing computer that can calculate the outcomes of any hypothetical scenario is to sell short God's All Knowingness. That is because the universe is not like a great machine, even though it operates with natural laws of time, matter and energy. God knows two things that cannot be computer "trend lined"... he knows what he will do in response to certain choices that humans make (his divine intervention) AND God knows in advance great shifts that will take place as the Holy Spirit ever works to turn people away from self destructive paths. God is not a passive god who has set the universe like a clock in motion and then sits back to watch, any more than humans are like that. Yes, humans go through terrible times of passivity in the face of evil, despair and indifference, and even ignoring God himself, but humans are not by nature total couch potatoes. So any sort of image of God, or humans, as, respectively, great and perfect, or flawed and imperfect, machines is totally misguided. Just as God's Holy Spirit never rests, human beings never reach a state where absolutely no one is responsive to the yearning for avoiding evil and doing good, and finding the real, and not the convenient, truthfulness of matters. So God knows not only the mechanics of the cause and effect of all past, present and future events, large or minuscule, but he also knows in advance the interaction of spirit and the healing, correcting, and even chastising effects of God's intervention throughout all human existence.

So suppose in the future someone steals my Coca Cola glass from me, LOL. God already knows in advance not only the logistical cause-and-effect of the movement of matter in time, space, with energy, and what happens to the glass, and to me, and to the perpetrators, but God also knows the spiritual goodness and damage that will result from individual choices made in that action. God knows in advance, before the thief steals my Coca Cola glass, that this was his or her intention, and why he or she thought that was a good idea, and what the state of their heart and soul is, and what will be the consequences, both cascading from the specific action, but also spiritually, all the way to the ultimate outcomes of each person at the end of their life, in personal judgment. Thus I am sitting here not knowing if in reality someday someone will steal my Coca Cola glass from me, but God not only knows (down to that incredible microcosm that only he has, such as knowing what subatomic particles of air are jostled as the person takes my glass, imagine that!)... but God also knows whether that person ever will regret, atone, remedy, or, rather, if it is just a pattern of cascading decisions that will result in more loss of potential grace, more downfall, more erosion of spirituality... and implications (such as others being led into sin by observing and condoning the future stealing of my Coca Cola glass). God already knows ALL of these things, all the thoughts and all the deeds, and all the movements of all the particles of the universe, as he has known even before he created the universe at all.

If you were able to exist before God even created the universe, God could tell you, "And some day this lady, Mary Major, will be blogging about me and explain to you my All Knowingness, and will use as an example her Coca Cola glass, and now I can tell you that...." [and here he would tell you what will eventually happen one way or the other to my Coca Cola glass]. God knows everything even before he created anything.

This is why you should be impressed with, and ultimately, love God, and fear him (in the good way, as in fearing that you would ever lose God through your own actions). Not only because his All Knowingness is so awesome and just about indescribable, but more to the point, even knowing all that he does, including what will happen, he seeks a personal relationship with each human being and meets you on a level that you can understand, and have dignity of response with him, through the choices you have, even though he knows all of the choices you will make in advance. God is always totally "in the moment" with each person, not withholding or holding against them what God knows they will do in the future. God does, however, know the sincerity and motivation through which you seek (or avoid) a relationship with him, and so of course he is never fooled.

Just to complete the example, as I sipped my Coca Cola (which I finished while typing this and the ice cubes are just about all melted), God knows how each of the particles of my beverage will pass through my system, which drops of fluid will replenish the moisture of my body, and which is excess that will get voided away into the fine bathroom (ironically said, ha) next door to my room. God then knows where those droplets of water and urea acids and whatnot and whatever will go into the sewage and drainage system, and where they will flow next and what they will do and where they will go, so far into the future and so long as the subatomic particles that make them up survive and exist. And should one have had such a conversation with God, one could ask him what would have been the difference if I had had a glass of skim milk instead, ha. Then he could also tell you what cows contributed to that glass of milk, etc. Really, God does know everything, not only as it happened, as it is happening, but in total into all of the future too, and he knows all of this all the time and simultaneously.

I hope that you have found this interesting, even my beverage choices and the location of the nearest bathroom in this household...

Humor aside, I really hope and pray that it restores, or gives to you for the first time, real comprehension of the awesome dimensions and reality of God the All Knowing.