As usual those who are either malicious or ignorant of the facts and the faith portray the Anglican initiative against a false backdrop of "concern about falling memberships" and "empty pews."
Yes, of course, all faiths are concerned about those who become lukewarm (whom God warned he would spit out of his mouth... not a good thing for avoiding hell) or fall from faith in total. So of course "empty pews" are a concern.
This is totally separate from "poaching" and other competitive motivations. Let's face it: politicians and the media have a total "winner and loser" "game" approach to life. So they see everything through those sooty glasses, so to speak.
Any Christian who knows the faith (and Muslims know this too about their faith) realizes, however, that sacred scriptures order unity: ONE church. Jesus himself repeatedly exhorted that Christians are one body and one global church.
So any unity efforts cannot be accused of being a "competitive" move. It has been one of the most grievous failures of Christians as a whole, generation after generation, that they have schismed and split. Trust me, God won't be handing out "belonged to best denomination" medals at a person's death and individual judgment; quite the contrary indeed.
Showing posts with label faith history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith history. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Understanding God: little look at big picture
How to say a few words about the gigantic subject of why God has chosen to allow humans to know him in the way that he has. In other words, many wonder why things have gone the way they have in getting to know God, rather than perhaps God imposing more of his presence on everyone in the world simultaneously. So here goes, but to keep this reasonably short and sweet, a few points to ponder rather than discourse.
1. God did introduce himself to everyone in the world, since he created Adam as first man, Eve as first woman, and they not only knew who God was but he was physically present in a form with them in Eden. We know this because they heard God's footsteps as he walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening, so God took a human form to interact with them face to face. (No, this does not mean that "all of God" is thus inserted into a human form. God IS everything, both visible and invisible, so he can't take all of himself away from heaven and the universe and stick his entirety into one place and not still be everywhere else. It never occurred to me to have to explain that until I came across people who actually thought that, particularly regarding Jesus. Pagans have a mental block with this, since they imagine their mythical and bogus gods to be able to move their position in a godlike way, appearing here and there, but when they are "there" they are only there. Pagan gods are by definition false since their believers do not acknowledge that the one true God can only be all encompassing and everywhere at the same time, since life and time do not exist outside of him. Thus God manifests in angelic or Theophany form, but that's an image of him, not his totality of spirit by any stretch of the imagination). So God did do the logical thing, which is to create a perfect place on earth where the first man and woman can know him and be companions to him.
2. Thus, even when they disobeyed God and were put out of Eden, they of course retained knowledge of God and a relationship with him. We know this because their sons, Cain and Abel, knew how to make offerings to God and received direct feedback from God on how worthy (or not) their offerings were. So God continues to speak with all the people of earth at the same time through Adam and Eve, their children, and the extended families that these children married into and beget on their own. Thus God continues in dialogue and relationship with each growing generation after Adam and Eve.
3. Now, as I discussed, at the same time as God is the creator of all that exists, both seen (earth and the universe) and unseen (heaven) in a physical way, God is also the creator in a spiritual way. Understanding God's role in the physical realm is like one lens in your pair of glasses, while understanding God's role in the spiritual (faith) realm is like the other lens in your pair of glasses. You need to look through them both at the same time, in a balanced way, to have a full and correct view. So it is alright for some of the faithful to be totally comfortable with Adam and Eve being literally the first humans created directly from dust by God, while others of the faithful believe that God created all that exists, including Adam and Eve, but that they are the beginning of "faith history," the "faith parents," not the only two human beings that exist in the beginning of humanity. Why do we know it is OK to have either view and still be faithful to God's word in scripture? Because if it were not OK to understand that other humans come into existence, God would have explained where the spouses of Adam and Eve's children came from. So it is not unfaithful to God's word in scripture to believe that Adam and Eve are either or both the actual biological parents of all human beings or they are the faith parents of all human beings, since they are the first and only that God chose to make himself known to.
The whole debate about evolution or creation, seven twenty-four hour days or millions-of-years God-days is really a diversion from faith, rather than faith affirming, because it is trying to textbook scripture into a "how did God actually do it, molecule by molecule" attempt that hinders rather than strengthens faith. I know that many in good faith feel the opposite, that they are somehow being disloyal to scripture if they believe that God had other people alive soon after Adam and Eve's creation, or that God may have used his own definition of a "day" during creation, rather than an earth-solar day. But again, if you really have faith in the scripture, which 1) states that the children of Adam and Eve married real people and had real children and 2) which states that God created the animals and the plants, but does not give details about his exact process, but extols Adam's naming and stewardship of them, you have to recognize that God used visible processes that humans can later discover, study, name, ponder and so forth as they collect knowledge (knowledge being one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, by the way).
Adam and Eve got into trouble because they sought the wrong knowledge, knowledge that would be used, they hoped, to be like God. So there is nothing wrong with knowledge (in fact, God teaches them how to create clothes from animal skins once they had their fall and had shame over nakedness in his sight). God expects humans to study nature and ponder how God made things work and ponder their wonder. There is a lengthy discourse by God in the scriptures (I'll let you look it up, LOL) where when he chastises humans and puts them in their place, he recounts the qualities of various animals that he, not humans, created, and the forces of nature that he, not humans, create and command. That is "good" knowledge, to understand (another gift of the Holy Spirit) the world around you, both geological and life forms, and the processes like weather... but the "bad" knowledge is to 1) think humans created it 2) that humans or idols control it, and not God and 3) to use that knowledge to be bad rather than good stewards, or to be unjust rather than just. So people of faith need to have faith that they are not "letting God down" or being "disloyal to his word" if they acknowledge that they do not fully understand how, or even why, God rendered creation as he did, using the time frames and processes that he created, ordained and commanded.
4. So now you start to understand why so much of Genesis is genealogy, with lists of who begot who. It is not just the list of proud parents and sons, but it is also a list of the humans and their families who keep in touch with God, who preserve the knowledge and dialogue initiated with Adam and Eve and their children. This is why it is called "faith history" in addition to "secular history." It is regular human history in that it lists events and places, but it is also faith history because it lists those who continued to know God and pass that knowledge and access to him through worship from generation to generation.
5. As I discussed in a recent blog, the early descendants of Adam and Eve met humans who, being from actual cities and their equivalent of "advanced civilization", seemed wondrous and they intermarried. We can understand that human nature is the same from the beginning to today. Some of the descendants of Adam and Eve would marry and bring their spouses into the faith, and knowledge of God, while others would marry and drift away, settling in distant places (which in those days could have been as short a distance as fifty miles) and not take their faith with them, and instead adapt to the local pagan beliefs and mythologies.
You see that same behavior on a micro scale every day in each family. Children in families that are religious move away, marry, and may change faith, lose faith, or transmit their faith to others. This is what happened, since humans are humans and God has given them free will, to the descendants of Adam and Eve. This is why a core of people retained the knowledge of God as he introduced himself to them, while others melded into the local pagan beliefs and mythologies.
6. This is where one must have faith and admire, rather than be disturbed, that God did not chase after every human being and demand that they know the one and only true him. Why is that reassuring rather than worrisome? Well, for many reasons. But the bottom line is this. Human beings will continue to exist and thrive only if they live in a truth based world, one that is genuine reality and honesty. The core of truthfulness and reality is realization of God's existence and his control of all that is and ever will be. Understanding humanity and understanding God are the most basic survival needs for the human species to continue living, say nothing of salvation after death. When humans start to deny God, it is the first warning sign that they will not thrive, and indeed could self destruct, very soon thereafter. This is not because God will smite them for not believing in him (as you can see, he lets regimes that deny him come and go, such as Communism). It is because when humans start to deny reality in the form of God, they will then start to engage in other self destructive behavior that is counter to reality as it really exists. Humans who live outside of truth and reality rapidly decay and fall apart, both individually and socially. We see much of that happening now. So God allows free choice (as he did when he created the angels and some decided not to serve and obey him, and hence fell from heaven) because free choice IS reality. God always opts for truthfulness and authenticity. If he wanted cool titanium robots he would have made them. He didn't. He made angels and he made human beings and they both have the ability to make a choice to believe and serve or not. The angels that fell believe God, obviously, since they were there in heaven with him and thus knew "how he did it," but they would not serve. Humans have to believe and choose to serve if they are to acknowledge truth and reality. It really is as simple as that.
7. Because God loves his creations, humans, who he considers, as the scriptures say, adopted children (and there is all sorts of cultural nuance in the esteem of those Biblical times for foster or adopted children, but rather than get into detail, scripture presents God's love as such to make clear that God is not false like the pagan gods, who presumably have biological children and so forth... God thus calls humans his adopted or foster children when he wants to be precise about that)....because God loves his children, even if they leave him and no longer believe, God has put in place a fail safe mechanism, LOL, or, a beacon, or a homing device, or a longing... or an emergency cell phone, whatever image you prefer, in their soul... a longing to know him. That is the movement of the Holy Spirit.
8. The Holy Spirit moves constantly among all individual human beings, and gatherings of them, whether near or afar, believers or not, stirring them to the desire to know the truth and to reach for that which is higher and the only genuine goodness that exists, that being God and a relationship with him. It is the Holy Spirit that maintains that yearning in people even through the spiritual aridity of living under God-denying tyrants and despots, of pagan rulership, or of people who drift away from knowledge of God and who have forgotten him and their faith history with him. It is that yearning, from the Holy Spirit, that results in societies and cultures developing respect for natural law and codes of conduct and humanity. It is the Holy Spirit who stirs among people who may develop a faith that is good intentioned but erroneous in theology, because the Holy Spirit is able to get at least a partial response that people want to be good to each other, and want both a more prosperous but also a more spiritual world.
I don't have the book in front of me now (probably in storage) but in one of the books, I think the series of books that interviewed Pope Benedict XVI before he was Pope, and he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, that he explains this in a very kind and insightful way that impressed me as I read it. I think he was being asked about other faiths, such as Buddhism and so forth, and why God would allow them to develop. The Pope explained, and here I am using my own words, that each faith that seeks belief in a higher power and spirituality and an inherent goodness among humans to each other is in a way, even obscurely or dimly, trying to reflect as in a mirror some level of acknowledgement of God through the work of the Holy Spirit.
So this is why as the growing multitudes of descendants of Adam and Eve populated the earth, just the core group, detailed generation by generation in the Bible, in the secular and faith history, maintained knowledge of the true God as he made himself known from the very beginning. However, you read in the Bible examples of where even pagan king, certain ones, had a open mindedness and even a longing for, and thus grew to respect and to worship, the God of the Israelites. Often that was through a demonstration of his power, as when God gifted Joseph with interpreting Pharaoh's dream. But there is no mistaking that there are examples in the Old Testament of where the demonstration of the true one God's power is the door opener, there is a yearning to understand the truth, a higher truth of God, that is like a slow growing seed, even among those who worshipped many idols and false gods.
9. So.... one of the questions, asked in jest sometimes but often in pain or puzzlement, by Jews is "why were we the Chosen People?" What I have detailed is why... because they are the lineage that through the generations of proliferating descendants of Adam and Eve, they have had consistent knowledge of the true one God, even when they were at their most disobedient. This is why I commented that the Jews know, at a gut level, God better than anyone. They have a continuity of God's constancy and eternal oneness and sameness through just about every possible variation of human history and challenge to their faith. This is why they were, Biblically, the Chosen People, because they have the unbroken continuity of knowing God as God first introduced himself to the first human beings.
10. To use a modern music term, Jews heard and hear the same song that is the true God, both plugged and unplugged.
11. However, God has always been consistent in stating that humans need and he will send the Savior, the Messiah. All of scripture points to the coming of Jesus Christ. God alone comprehends all of the perfection of his timing, that he sent Jesus when he did, where he did, to minister as he did, and to fulfill the scriptures and proclaim the New Covenant. This is, obviously, a huge topic of itself, but Jesus must be understood in the context of what I am explaining to you as being the refreshment, the renewal, of God's relationship to humans, beyond the tenuous, extreme minority of human population that were the descendants who have held fast to the continuity of the lineage of knowing God from the time of Adam and Eve to the then present. In the perfect timing that only God understands, since he is All Knowing, and knows all of what humans need, Jesus, who already existed in heaven as part of God himself eternal the beginning and the ever being of All, took human form in order to bring knowledge of God to all the world.
12. Previous to Jesus being born to humanity, humans knew God one of the two ways I have described. The first was through the lineage of those who recall and renew their relationship and service to God since Adam and Eve. The second was through those who seek God, in often very wrong or imperfect guises, but in honest response to the urgings of the Holy Spirit throughout the world. This is one reason that Jesus is given a title of the New Adam, not only because Jesus, corrects the great wrong of disobedience by Adam, but also because Jesus brings the face of God to all the world, as Adam first knew God in the Garden face to face. Jesus ministered only to the Jews, since Jesus was fulfillment of the Old Covenant with the Israelites and the bringing of the New Covenant to them... but it was obvious that Jesus was, as he said, the sign for all humankind. After his Resurrection and the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, God made it known that now the Gospel was to be preached to all. Jesus was like global email :-)
13. Now you might better understand what I have explained in previous blog postings about Islam. Descendants of Adam and Eve, and of Abraham, the Patriarch of what would become the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the forefathers of the Arabic people who would become Muslims were of that lineage who knew the true God, but who moved and settled at a distance from their brethren. This is all detailed in the Old Testament, but not what happened specifically to them, but we know through the obvious secular history that they settled among pagans in the area that is now Saudi Arabia. Thus they are a group of the many descendants who did not take the faith "along with them." That was not easy to do, since the Israelites were local patriarchs and eventually after the Exodus, a theocracy (religious rulership) on a very local basis, with the Ark and the Temple central. It's not like today where people could pack up their faith and believe in another neighborhood or country. So when people spread out to gain land for their growing families (and to avoid conflict), they could not really take their faith and remembrance with them. The Prophet (PBUH) reconnected those descendants back to the lineage of remembering and knowing the one true God, the God of Abraham, and also faithfully repeating the message and miracles of Jesus. Islam was born in order to plug those descendants of Adam and Eve back into the shared lineage of knowledge of the one true God.
To wrap up this little look at the big picture, one must, in honesty, admire and appreciate that God is no autocrat. God makes himself known as he really is, as he truthfully is, and is consistent and constant through the generations of human beings and indeed through the ages, since he is Eternal and Unchanging. He does not force humans into robotic or other artificial obedience since that is not his nature but more important than that, it is not the truth. Life and love is the truth, not coerced or enforced behavior, and God is the source of all life and love. Thus God provided a constancy of access to knowing him from the very beginning, and sent prophets among believers when they needed to correct the disobedience and straying of his people. Why does God punish, as we know he does, then? Because what he is punishing is denial of truth. Denying truth is, as I explained in the beginning of this commentary, not a useful survival trait for humanity. Disobedience to God is denial of truth, not God being arbitrary. For example, it's disobedient but also more to the point simply wrong, a lie, to worship an idol, a false god that simply does not exist, or the workings of human beings own hands. God punishes humans when they deny the truth because ultimately humans will destroy themselves (as they are most certainly doing now) by living amidst a fake world of lies. Denial of truth, constant lies and falseness are already destroying the livelihood, the sanity, the health, the morality, the ethics, and the decency of humanity... God dumping an asteroid onto the earth would just be the icing on the crumbling cake of what humanity is already doing to itself by denying truth in all arenas of life.
A species, human beings, cannot continue to thrive and/or survive in a world that they perceive in increasingly total falsehood. God already knows "how it will all turn out." More to the point, though, is to recognize that each saved soul is precious to God, just as each and every of the innumerable multitude of angels are known to him individually and loved by him, and as they serve God they share in his beatific vision of all that can and will be. Thus God will continue to be patient with generation after generation of unfaithful disbelievers because he loves and will save those, however few, that DO remain faithful to him and thus cognizant of the truth. I wrote not too long ago about the importance of not seeking the "best" or "right" faith, but seeking the truth, which will if honestly (and sanely) done will only lead you to the one true God who is truth and the source of all that is true. This is why humans can, and should, only marvel at the one true God, not the imaginings of human beings, who can in his perfection balance the giving of human beings the "free will" that they, like the angels in the beginning, craved and demanded, but will also draw a firm line in the sand about reality and the inevitable consequences of denying the truth and, thus, him.
Denying the truth of God is just like denying the truth in a secular life or death situation. If the bridge is out, broken over a raging river, it is not a survival strategy to deny the truth of the bridge being out and driving over it, and thus plunging to one's death, nonetheless. News story commenters often sardonically call that "Darwin at work," when someone does something incredibly stupid. It is the same with believing in the truth of how the world and the universe really works and of God's real presence. Disbelieving the truth means bad and stupid decisions that have their own consequences in the near term (as we see all over the world these days) AND, even if one evades outright denial of survival trait truths in life, when one dies one finds out the reality of God when it is too late to change what one has done in disobedience while alive. Again, it's not just because people "behaved bad" and God's "mad at them," but because disobedience to the God and denial of the truth is viral... disobedient believers and disbelievers don't just harm themselves but they harm others and lead others away from the truth. We see this on a massive scale today, one of the greatest perils facing young people today who have grown up in such hugely false times, knowing nothing different from fraud, fakery, poseurs, pride, denial and falsehood.
How difficult is that to understand? When Satan refused to serve he then got busy egging humans on to likewise not serve God. In a similar way, disbelievers and disobedient believers behave like mini-Satans, since their teachings, deeds and life examples are likewise intended to mislead others, leading them astray from God. That all ends badly, either by making life a lie and thus unbearable in either the short or the long term, or at the very end, when one finds that indeed God exists and he knows all that you have thought and done and has judged you upon your death.
The reassurance of God's constancy and ability to forgive anything (if sincere and immediate) should be of far greater comfort to humans than it is. Why is it not more reassuring? Because people have become somewhat addicted to uncertainty and falsehood, where even miserable lies are "better" than hopeful and good truths, in the minds of many.
In closing that line of thought, let's loop back to Adam. Think about how he dealt, poorly and thus fatally, with certainty and uncertainty. Adam embraced certainty, but only partially. He obviously believed in God, being face to face and taught by God, and thus he believed that the tree of knowledge had fruit that would give him some of God's knowledge. But here is what I mean by false love of uncertainty. God tells him not to eat the fruit of that tree. Eve, at the prompting of Satan, brings the apple to Adam. You must understand that in that moment Adam loved uncertainty, the "maybe" .... because obviously he thought, "Maybe I can get away with this." That is the horror of what modern humans are increasingly falling into. They have become in love with lies and uncertainty, and even denial of truth, since it plays to their weakness, which is pride. I mean, how dumb could Adam be? He believes God about everything, but then when offered the first chance to be uncertain about the truth of one specific thing that God says, he "bites." But far from being dumb, Adam is classic human being, where pride tempts a human to disbelieve the truth since he, or she, then thinks they control other "options." Then, like I gave the analogy above, people will drive over bridges that have fallen down, thinking that they have "options" rather than the humility of truth that the bridge has fallen down.
I hope that you have found this helpful.
1. God did introduce himself to everyone in the world, since he created Adam as first man, Eve as first woman, and they not only knew who God was but he was physically present in a form with them in Eden. We know this because they heard God's footsteps as he walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening, so God took a human form to interact with them face to face. (No, this does not mean that "all of God" is thus inserted into a human form. God IS everything, both visible and invisible, so he can't take all of himself away from heaven and the universe and stick his entirety into one place and not still be everywhere else. It never occurred to me to have to explain that until I came across people who actually thought that, particularly regarding Jesus. Pagans have a mental block with this, since they imagine their mythical and bogus gods to be able to move their position in a godlike way, appearing here and there, but when they are "there" they are only there. Pagan gods are by definition false since their believers do not acknowledge that the one true God can only be all encompassing and everywhere at the same time, since life and time do not exist outside of him. Thus God manifests in angelic or Theophany form, but that's an image of him, not his totality of spirit by any stretch of the imagination). So God did do the logical thing, which is to create a perfect place on earth where the first man and woman can know him and be companions to him.
2. Thus, even when they disobeyed God and were put out of Eden, they of course retained knowledge of God and a relationship with him. We know this because their sons, Cain and Abel, knew how to make offerings to God and received direct feedback from God on how worthy (or not) their offerings were. So God continues to speak with all the people of earth at the same time through Adam and Eve, their children, and the extended families that these children married into and beget on their own. Thus God continues in dialogue and relationship with each growing generation after Adam and Eve.
3. Now, as I discussed, at the same time as God is the creator of all that exists, both seen (earth and the universe) and unseen (heaven) in a physical way, God is also the creator in a spiritual way. Understanding God's role in the physical realm is like one lens in your pair of glasses, while understanding God's role in the spiritual (faith) realm is like the other lens in your pair of glasses. You need to look through them both at the same time, in a balanced way, to have a full and correct view. So it is alright for some of the faithful to be totally comfortable with Adam and Eve being literally the first humans created directly from dust by God, while others of the faithful believe that God created all that exists, including Adam and Eve, but that they are the beginning of "faith history," the "faith parents," not the only two human beings that exist in the beginning of humanity. Why do we know it is OK to have either view and still be faithful to God's word in scripture? Because if it were not OK to understand that other humans come into existence, God would have explained where the spouses of Adam and Eve's children came from. So it is not unfaithful to God's word in scripture to believe that Adam and Eve are either or both the actual biological parents of all human beings or they are the faith parents of all human beings, since they are the first and only that God chose to make himself known to.
The whole debate about evolution or creation, seven twenty-four hour days or millions-of-years God-days is really a diversion from faith, rather than faith affirming, because it is trying to textbook scripture into a "how did God actually do it, molecule by molecule" attempt that hinders rather than strengthens faith. I know that many in good faith feel the opposite, that they are somehow being disloyal to scripture if they believe that God had other people alive soon after Adam and Eve's creation, or that God may have used his own definition of a "day" during creation, rather than an earth-solar day. But again, if you really have faith in the scripture, which 1) states that the children of Adam and Eve married real people and had real children and 2) which states that God created the animals and the plants, but does not give details about his exact process, but extols Adam's naming and stewardship of them, you have to recognize that God used visible processes that humans can later discover, study, name, ponder and so forth as they collect knowledge (knowledge being one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, by the way).
Adam and Eve got into trouble because they sought the wrong knowledge, knowledge that would be used, they hoped, to be like God. So there is nothing wrong with knowledge (in fact, God teaches them how to create clothes from animal skins once they had their fall and had shame over nakedness in his sight). God expects humans to study nature and ponder how God made things work and ponder their wonder. There is a lengthy discourse by God in the scriptures (I'll let you look it up, LOL) where when he chastises humans and puts them in their place, he recounts the qualities of various animals that he, not humans, created, and the forces of nature that he, not humans, create and command. That is "good" knowledge, to understand (another gift of the Holy Spirit) the world around you, both geological and life forms, and the processes like weather... but the "bad" knowledge is to 1) think humans created it 2) that humans or idols control it, and not God and 3) to use that knowledge to be bad rather than good stewards, or to be unjust rather than just. So people of faith need to have faith that they are not "letting God down" or being "disloyal to his word" if they acknowledge that they do not fully understand how, or even why, God rendered creation as he did, using the time frames and processes that he created, ordained and commanded.
4. So now you start to understand why so much of Genesis is genealogy, with lists of who begot who. It is not just the list of proud parents and sons, but it is also a list of the humans and their families who keep in touch with God, who preserve the knowledge and dialogue initiated with Adam and Eve and their children. This is why it is called "faith history" in addition to "secular history." It is regular human history in that it lists events and places, but it is also faith history because it lists those who continued to know God and pass that knowledge and access to him through worship from generation to generation.
5. As I discussed in a recent blog, the early descendants of Adam and Eve met humans who, being from actual cities and their equivalent of "advanced civilization", seemed wondrous and they intermarried. We can understand that human nature is the same from the beginning to today. Some of the descendants of Adam and Eve would marry and bring their spouses into the faith, and knowledge of God, while others would marry and drift away, settling in distant places (which in those days could have been as short a distance as fifty miles) and not take their faith with them, and instead adapt to the local pagan beliefs and mythologies.
You see that same behavior on a micro scale every day in each family. Children in families that are religious move away, marry, and may change faith, lose faith, or transmit their faith to others. This is what happened, since humans are humans and God has given them free will, to the descendants of Adam and Eve. This is why a core of people retained the knowledge of God as he introduced himself to them, while others melded into the local pagan beliefs and mythologies.
6. This is where one must have faith and admire, rather than be disturbed, that God did not chase after every human being and demand that they know the one and only true him. Why is that reassuring rather than worrisome? Well, for many reasons. But the bottom line is this. Human beings will continue to exist and thrive only if they live in a truth based world, one that is genuine reality and honesty. The core of truthfulness and reality is realization of God's existence and his control of all that is and ever will be. Understanding humanity and understanding God are the most basic survival needs for the human species to continue living, say nothing of salvation after death. When humans start to deny God, it is the first warning sign that they will not thrive, and indeed could self destruct, very soon thereafter. This is not because God will smite them for not believing in him (as you can see, he lets regimes that deny him come and go, such as Communism). It is because when humans start to deny reality in the form of God, they will then start to engage in other self destructive behavior that is counter to reality as it really exists. Humans who live outside of truth and reality rapidly decay and fall apart, both individually and socially. We see much of that happening now. So God allows free choice (as he did when he created the angels and some decided not to serve and obey him, and hence fell from heaven) because free choice IS reality. God always opts for truthfulness and authenticity. If he wanted cool titanium robots he would have made them. He didn't. He made angels and he made human beings and they both have the ability to make a choice to believe and serve or not. The angels that fell believe God, obviously, since they were there in heaven with him and thus knew "how he did it," but they would not serve. Humans have to believe and choose to serve if they are to acknowledge truth and reality. It really is as simple as that.
7. Because God loves his creations, humans, who he considers, as the scriptures say, adopted children (and there is all sorts of cultural nuance in the esteem of those Biblical times for foster or adopted children, but rather than get into detail, scripture presents God's love as such to make clear that God is not false like the pagan gods, who presumably have biological children and so forth... God thus calls humans his adopted or foster children when he wants to be precise about that)....because God loves his children, even if they leave him and no longer believe, God has put in place a fail safe mechanism, LOL, or, a beacon, or a homing device, or a longing... or an emergency cell phone, whatever image you prefer, in their soul... a longing to know him. That is the movement of the Holy Spirit.
8. The Holy Spirit moves constantly among all individual human beings, and gatherings of them, whether near or afar, believers or not, stirring them to the desire to know the truth and to reach for that which is higher and the only genuine goodness that exists, that being God and a relationship with him. It is the Holy Spirit that maintains that yearning in people even through the spiritual aridity of living under God-denying tyrants and despots, of pagan rulership, or of people who drift away from knowledge of God and who have forgotten him and their faith history with him. It is that yearning, from the Holy Spirit, that results in societies and cultures developing respect for natural law and codes of conduct and humanity. It is the Holy Spirit who stirs among people who may develop a faith that is good intentioned but erroneous in theology, because the Holy Spirit is able to get at least a partial response that people want to be good to each other, and want both a more prosperous but also a more spiritual world.
I don't have the book in front of me now (probably in storage) but in one of the books, I think the series of books that interviewed Pope Benedict XVI before he was Pope, and he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, that he explains this in a very kind and insightful way that impressed me as I read it. I think he was being asked about other faiths, such as Buddhism and so forth, and why God would allow them to develop. The Pope explained, and here I am using my own words, that each faith that seeks belief in a higher power and spirituality and an inherent goodness among humans to each other is in a way, even obscurely or dimly, trying to reflect as in a mirror some level of acknowledgement of God through the work of the Holy Spirit.
So this is why as the growing multitudes of descendants of Adam and Eve populated the earth, just the core group, detailed generation by generation in the Bible, in the secular and faith history, maintained knowledge of the true God as he made himself known from the very beginning. However, you read in the Bible examples of where even pagan king, certain ones, had a open mindedness and even a longing for, and thus grew to respect and to worship, the God of the Israelites. Often that was through a demonstration of his power, as when God gifted Joseph with interpreting Pharaoh's dream. But there is no mistaking that there are examples in the Old Testament of where the demonstration of the true one God's power is the door opener, there is a yearning to understand the truth, a higher truth of God, that is like a slow growing seed, even among those who worshipped many idols and false gods.
9. So.... one of the questions, asked in jest sometimes but often in pain or puzzlement, by Jews is "why were we the Chosen People?" What I have detailed is why... because they are the lineage that through the generations of proliferating descendants of Adam and Eve, they have had consistent knowledge of the true one God, even when they were at their most disobedient. This is why I commented that the Jews know, at a gut level, God better than anyone. They have a continuity of God's constancy and eternal oneness and sameness through just about every possible variation of human history and challenge to their faith. This is why they were, Biblically, the Chosen People, because they have the unbroken continuity of knowing God as God first introduced himself to the first human beings.
10. To use a modern music term, Jews heard and hear the same song that is the true God, both plugged and unplugged.
11. However, God has always been consistent in stating that humans need and he will send the Savior, the Messiah. All of scripture points to the coming of Jesus Christ. God alone comprehends all of the perfection of his timing, that he sent Jesus when he did, where he did, to minister as he did, and to fulfill the scriptures and proclaim the New Covenant. This is, obviously, a huge topic of itself, but Jesus must be understood in the context of what I am explaining to you as being the refreshment, the renewal, of God's relationship to humans, beyond the tenuous, extreme minority of human population that were the descendants who have held fast to the continuity of the lineage of knowing God from the time of Adam and Eve to the then present. In the perfect timing that only God understands, since he is All Knowing, and knows all of what humans need, Jesus, who already existed in heaven as part of God himself eternal the beginning and the ever being of All, took human form in order to bring knowledge of God to all the world.
12. Previous to Jesus being born to humanity, humans knew God one of the two ways I have described. The first was through the lineage of those who recall and renew their relationship and service to God since Adam and Eve. The second was through those who seek God, in often very wrong or imperfect guises, but in honest response to the urgings of the Holy Spirit throughout the world. This is one reason that Jesus is given a title of the New Adam, not only because Jesus, corrects the great wrong of disobedience by Adam, but also because Jesus brings the face of God to all the world, as Adam first knew God in the Garden face to face. Jesus ministered only to the Jews, since Jesus was fulfillment of the Old Covenant with the Israelites and the bringing of the New Covenant to them... but it was obvious that Jesus was, as he said, the sign for all humankind. After his Resurrection and the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, God made it known that now the Gospel was to be preached to all. Jesus was like global email :-)
13. Now you might better understand what I have explained in previous blog postings about Islam. Descendants of Adam and Eve, and of Abraham, the Patriarch of what would become the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the forefathers of the Arabic people who would become Muslims were of that lineage who knew the true God, but who moved and settled at a distance from their brethren. This is all detailed in the Old Testament, but not what happened specifically to them, but we know through the obvious secular history that they settled among pagans in the area that is now Saudi Arabia. Thus they are a group of the many descendants who did not take the faith "along with them." That was not easy to do, since the Israelites were local patriarchs and eventually after the Exodus, a theocracy (religious rulership) on a very local basis, with the Ark and the Temple central. It's not like today where people could pack up their faith and believe in another neighborhood or country. So when people spread out to gain land for their growing families (and to avoid conflict), they could not really take their faith and remembrance with them. The Prophet (PBUH) reconnected those descendants back to the lineage of remembering and knowing the one true God, the God of Abraham, and also faithfully repeating the message and miracles of Jesus. Islam was born in order to plug those descendants of Adam and Eve back into the shared lineage of knowledge of the one true God.
To wrap up this little look at the big picture, one must, in honesty, admire and appreciate that God is no autocrat. God makes himself known as he really is, as he truthfully is, and is consistent and constant through the generations of human beings and indeed through the ages, since he is Eternal and Unchanging. He does not force humans into robotic or other artificial obedience since that is not his nature but more important than that, it is not the truth. Life and love is the truth, not coerced or enforced behavior, and God is the source of all life and love. Thus God provided a constancy of access to knowing him from the very beginning, and sent prophets among believers when they needed to correct the disobedience and straying of his people. Why does God punish, as we know he does, then? Because what he is punishing is denial of truth. Denying truth is, as I explained in the beginning of this commentary, not a useful survival trait for humanity. Disobedience to God is denial of truth, not God being arbitrary. For example, it's disobedient but also more to the point simply wrong, a lie, to worship an idol, a false god that simply does not exist, or the workings of human beings own hands. God punishes humans when they deny the truth because ultimately humans will destroy themselves (as they are most certainly doing now) by living amidst a fake world of lies. Denial of truth, constant lies and falseness are already destroying the livelihood, the sanity, the health, the morality, the ethics, and the decency of humanity... God dumping an asteroid onto the earth would just be the icing on the crumbling cake of what humanity is already doing to itself by denying truth in all arenas of life.
A species, human beings, cannot continue to thrive and/or survive in a world that they perceive in increasingly total falsehood. God already knows "how it will all turn out." More to the point, though, is to recognize that each saved soul is precious to God, just as each and every of the innumerable multitude of angels are known to him individually and loved by him, and as they serve God they share in his beatific vision of all that can and will be. Thus God will continue to be patient with generation after generation of unfaithful disbelievers because he loves and will save those, however few, that DO remain faithful to him and thus cognizant of the truth. I wrote not too long ago about the importance of not seeking the "best" or "right" faith, but seeking the truth, which will if honestly (and sanely) done will only lead you to the one true God who is truth and the source of all that is true. This is why humans can, and should, only marvel at the one true God, not the imaginings of human beings, who can in his perfection balance the giving of human beings the "free will" that they, like the angels in the beginning, craved and demanded, but will also draw a firm line in the sand about reality and the inevitable consequences of denying the truth and, thus, him.
Denying the truth of God is just like denying the truth in a secular life or death situation. If the bridge is out, broken over a raging river, it is not a survival strategy to deny the truth of the bridge being out and driving over it, and thus plunging to one's death, nonetheless. News story commenters often sardonically call that "Darwin at work," when someone does something incredibly stupid. It is the same with believing in the truth of how the world and the universe really works and of God's real presence. Disbelieving the truth means bad and stupid decisions that have their own consequences in the near term (as we see all over the world these days) AND, even if one evades outright denial of survival trait truths in life, when one dies one finds out the reality of God when it is too late to change what one has done in disobedience while alive. Again, it's not just because people "behaved bad" and God's "mad at them," but because disobedience to the God and denial of the truth is viral... disobedient believers and disbelievers don't just harm themselves but they harm others and lead others away from the truth. We see this on a massive scale today, one of the greatest perils facing young people today who have grown up in such hugely false times, knowing nothing different from fraud, fakery, poseurs, pride, denial and falsehood.
How difficult is that to understand? When Satan refused to serve he then got busy egging humans on to likewise not serve God. In a similar way, disbelievers and disobedient believers behave like mini-Satans, since their teachings, deeds and life examples are likewise intended to mislead others, leading them astray from God. That all ends badly, either by making life a lie and thus unbearable in either the short or the long term, or at the very end, when one finds that indeed God exists and he knows all that you have thought and done and has judged you upon your death.
The reassurance of God's constancy and ability to forgive anything (if sincere and immediate) should be of far greater comfort to humans than it is. Why is it not more reassuring? Because people have become somewhat addicted to uncertainty and falsehood, where even miserable lies are "better" than hopeful and good truths, in the minds of many.
In closing that line of thought, let's loop back to Adam. Think about how he dealt, poorly and thus fatally, with certainty and uncertainty. Adam embraced certainty, but only partially. He obviously believed in God, being face to face and taught by God, and thus he believed that the tree of knowledge had fruit that would give him some of God's knowledge. But here is what I mean by false love of uncertainty. God tells him not to eat the fruit of that tree. Eve, at the prompting of Satan, brings the apple to Adam. You must understand that in that moment Adam loved uncertainty, the "maybe" .... because obviously he thought, "Maybe I can get away with this." That is the horror of what modern humans are increasingly falling into. They have become in love with lies and uncertainty, and even denial of truth, since it plays to their weakness, which is pride. I mean, how dumb could Adam be? He believes God about everything, but then when offered the first chance to be uncertain about the truth of one specific thing that God says, he "bites." But far from being dumb, Adam is classic human being, where pride tempts a human to disbelieve the truth since he, or she, then thinks they control other "options." Then, like I gave the analogy above, people will drive over bridges that have fallen down, thinking that they have "options" rather than the humility of truth that the bridge has fallen down.
I hope that you have found this helpful.
Friday, March 6, 2009
A creative writing and mental cleansing exercise
A creative writing and mental cleansing exercise
I’ve noticed that this modern society is very much into “cleansers,” usually for imaginary “detoxing” reasons, including the puzzling popularity of “colonics.” Well, detoxing and cleansing are of course worthy and important concepts in general, so here are a mental and spiritual cleansing exercise. Its purpose is to help people realign themselves into a more realistic perception of actual life and prudent separation from the depressive and paranoid imaginations that moderns now suffer from (and inflict on each other). This is also part of the faith and reason case studies, with a focus on regaining more authentic reasoning capabilities. Since it is a creative visualization exercise, you can also use this is part of my series on creative writing and arts exercises that focus on reality to provide positively imaginative and cutting edge creativity.
The basic premise of this story, this visualization, is that we are going to think of a scientifically and realistic, factual way to determine what actually happened each day in human history. In this story the reason that such a capability is created is that humans have lost the ability to look on their own past with any balance and reason. Here is an example of the problem. Some people are fascinated by ancient Indian cultures, such as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans, because they consider certain segments of their culture to be either “cool” or “enlightening and mystical.” Thus they think that because there are certain cultural developments in their pagan mythologies and supposed forecasting of world events and so forth through their calendars that are exciting, mysterious and cool that the whole society had undue merit. By “undue merit” I mean that rather than just appreciating that they were fellow human beings who raised children and did the best they could, they are given, by some people, a numinous elevation in their importance. In fact, this elevation obscures the very unpleasant facts of their bloody torture and sacrifice of thousands and thousands of innocent people, including infants. As schools have become less judgmental and more “politically correct,” young people are less exposed to the mundane realities of human history and as a result turn to the imaginary entertainment media and other “soothsayers” who focus on the “cool” parts of human history and ignore the rest. This has led modern society into an awful mess and the ability to reason for millions of people has been polluted and damaged.
So let us suppose that there is a factual and scientifically valid way to take someone who has such a viewpoint, put them into a room, and turn on a television that allows them to see what actually happened on any given day in, let’s say, an Aztec city. This would be an actual viewing of the minute by minute genuine activities as they occurred. So there would be many hours of footage of watching people just do their day to day lives, raising children and slogging and toiling in the fields.
Here is the scientific principle of how this would work. It is important to understand that there is a way that pure factual science could in theory provide this capability. It is important to have a factual and scientific approach as part of the mental cleansing exercise so that one does not imagine that “aliens” or “seers” “provide” this “gift.” It is that mindset, both conscious and unconscious, that has gotten society into this dire mess of toxic mentality. So here is the science. Most people know that we are able to see and hear things because energy is reflected and/or emitted outward where the ears and the eyes then “catch” that energy and therefore perceive what is happening. We also know that the light continues onward into space. This is how we see the stars, because their light travels long distances until it reaches our eyes. Many jokes have been made on this principle that imaginary aliens will someday receive the first beams of our first television programs and enjoy (or puzzle over) “Howdy Doody” and “I Love Lucy.” So using that scientific principle, let’s take it a step further and build a system where not just television and radio waves but all waves, light and sound, are picked up in space to provide a real time image of what was happening on the surface of the earth.
So imagine that a million light years from earth (the distance that light travels in a year) we had cameras that were so powerful that they could collect the light of everything that was actually happening on earth, and so refined that they could detect down to the individual human or animal’s activity. In other words it is like installing a powerful traffic live cam except the events have already taken place and these cameras are positioned far enough out in space to collect all this light. Similarly microphones would be installed so that all sounds that were ever emitted were captured and matched to the visual images. This is, of course, where the science breaks down since all light and all sound is not preserved indefinitely nor are they powerful enough to actually live on in space. If you drop a book in your house the people on the street do not hear it because the sound waves do not travel farther than the walls of your home. But for the purpose of this exercise, let us assume that it is possible to gather all of the light and sound waves that were ever emitted on earth and view/listen to them as a genuine live stream of what had actually happened minute by minute on earth.
Thus one could take an Aztec admirer and put him or her in a room that receives these transmissions and they could watch and see and listen to any particular day of events in a given location in that time. So the viewer could flip the dial and watch a selected location on a selected day. Remember, they are not “back there” “in time” as if in a supposed “time machine,” they are simply watching, like on TIVO, what had actually happened in the past.
Nothing would restore mental balance and sanity faster. Anyone could watch day after day of reality, the boring mundane existence of people who had to labor for the food that they ate. However, one would also see that the one joy that people had was their children. People could watch day after day, year after year of this “television into the past” and essentially observe as it happened the reality that life was difficult compared to today in that everyone had to labor long hours just to survive, growing their food, building shelter, obtaining water and heat and raising their children. People could then also observe that children were the one gift that everyone had and valued… children were the treasure that even the poorest could “afford.” Such observing would take the glamour out of the few minutes of prurient and occult activity and perception of the culture as a whole, and restore the luster of understanding that through the generations it was children that were the goal of all of day to day human activity. Children were the reward for living, and rich and poor both agreed and were able to share in that common perception of the priority of life.
Thus one could restore through this television into the past a dose of the day to day reality as it occurred, not as compressed summaries or sound bytes of the exciting and mysterious “bits.” Further, one can then debunk the mystery of how things happened. One would see that no alien spaceships arrived to “give” the Aztecs or the Mayans “their calendar.” They could flip the channel and watch those who worked on those labors scratch their heads and observe phenomena that they did not understand (such as the stars), and then assemble the “facts” of what they saw into theories of world view. We could see if maybe the calendar turned out the way it did because King Freddie the Stubborn was in charge and the palace astronomers knew that he wanted the calendar to turn out a certain way. We could see that maybe one of the court astronomers is nagged by his hag wife and thus is in a bad mood whenever he works on the calendar. He thinks it is funny that he carves one of the snake gods to look like her. And then flipping the channel the observer could see how very uncool the roundup of the month’s bloody sacrifice of village people really was.
So using this television into the past people could book time in the television room to see what really happened in life in the past. It would serve two purposes. One is the obvious exciting ability to see what is true. For example, one could dial in and see the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. One could see that slaves built the pyramids, not freaky aliens who flew in on a ship and told the slave masters what to do. So with the television into the past one could settle all sorts of debates about what actually happened and what did not. But more importantly, and you may not believe this but it is true, the second purpose would be to observe how human life is like watching paint dry. It is NOT about the supernatural and human power mongering moments that occur in a period of moments or days, or during the reigns of forgotten despots and kings. It is about millions of people at a time walking around doing what they have to do to survive in a day, and build a society where their children can at least live and eventually thrive.
This is why such a capability is so detoxing and mentally cleansing. It would counteract and refute the over stimulated and distorted “sound byte” and “visual byte,” say nothing of the “enlightenment byte” that has polluted modern faculties. Nothing would restore genuine balance more than watching, oh let’s say a million years, of early humans walking around picking berries and roots, hunting for animals to eat, finding caves to live in, and raising their children, and that’s it. A day of viewing would reveal exiting things such as what prehistoric animals existed and how humans got by in such a difficult life, but quickly one would see that the real message is the “typical day:” drink water where you can find it, lapping it like an animal, dig for roots, pick fruit, eat some leftover animal kill, shelter from the sun and from predators, carry your children. What an exciting “direct TV” package that would be! One could watch millions of days of people trudging along trying to survive and valuing their young (that’s their young, such as their children, not their youth, such as the lack of wrinkles).
One could see, as I mentioned, that Jesus Christ really existed. One could also watch the real Buddha sit under the real tree. One could see the miracles of Jesus, including, of course, his resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven. But the television would not ultimately give one faith in God, of course. All one can do is see and believe the reality of God’s prophets. One could look down on the Israelites and see the great Theophany of God on Mount Sinai as they did, where God descended like a thunderous cloud and appeared to Moses alone. But of course watching the real events does not infuse faith into one’s heart thousands of years later. That is the whole point of the scriptures: you have to have actually been there to feel that full infusion of belief. The Apostles repeatedly explain that in their writings that they saw all of this with their own eyes and participated. One of the early Church fathers wrote about people who had seen Jesus and been cured by him still being alive and witnessing to the reality many years later. When one is part of the day to day one receives the full infusion of belief because you are part of the reality. But even the most perfect TV that allows one to look back in time, even in the side by side minute by minute way, cannot give the same fullness of infusion of impact of the events and the faith that is engendered as having actually been there and participating. That is the entire point of genuine history: you study and believe the people who were actually there.
So now I’ve created almost a longing for this past TV capability among you, I would guess. That is a good thing even though it cannot be technically fulfilled. That craving can be satisfied as it always was traditionally, until these modern dreadful times, which is through study and discernment of the facts, using faith and reasoning. There is a plentitude of literature by those who lived, for example, during the time of Jesus, the decades after Jesus, the hundred years after Jesus, and the two hundred years after Jesus. Moderns can actually read the facts of what people said, saw and believed and then decide on the impact on their faith. Instead we have people running around thinking that either nothing can be believed or everything can be believed as having actually happened, or worse, “could have happened.” I’ve pointed out in this post and other previous postings that there is a vast difference between the facts of real people who lived and existed, such as Jesus Christ, the Buddha, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and giving equal credence to writings that are mythologies (such as the fictional Greek and Roman pantheon of deities) and even worse than that, not reading any of the facts of who lived and what happened and making up by pulling out of one’s own mind and paranoia imaginary scenarios of “aliens” and so forth.
Sane thinking and sane living involve this order of progression:
1) Read and study factual accounts where they occur, whether writings or scientific records, such as fossils and geological formations.
2) Identify correctly those productions of humans that are pure imaginary that are done for cultural reasons and thus have value, of course, but are not factual.
3) Develop theories (called “hypotheses”) for the missing gaps, for what is not understood, but starting with the firm foundation of what is known and what can be reasonably inferred and deduced.
This used to be the way that individuals, groups and societies used to think and perceive reality. I am horrified to the very roots of my hair at how fewer and fewer people think in a clear, cleansed and factual way in these dreadful modern times. The imaginary has overthrown and distorted the reality.
Why has this happened? The obvious two reasons are that prosperity has separated too many power brokers from the reality and tempo of actual life, life that used to center around survival first and prosperity second. The second reason is that entertainment media has taken over the thought process of the vast majority of people, also the result of prosperity. People no longer value facts and reasoning, all they care about is “imagining,” “escapism” (which then becomes their new and horrible reality) and artificial or extreme sensation seeking. Any given hour of modern media gives more stimulation than an entire year of actual life would have among even the Aztecs. That is what has been totally lost in the modern psyche and what our theoretical “past TV” would provide the instant cure for.
So what do we do? We have to get back to genuine reality of perceptions within a reasonable tempo of life. Humans never lived in a time where our children, for example, can experience a daily diet of overstimulation. Even in the most dreadful times of war, for example, in human history, the vast majority of people had to plod each day to the fields to tend to the crops, their herds of animals and their children. No human ever experienced a daily or even a monthly or yearly diet of over stimulation as do our children and adults in just one hour of video games, television viewing, celebrity antics or the news, which contains so much that is dreadful. I’m not calling for censuring, but rather an understanding of times that have passed. It used to be, when I was young, that one could go a year without hearing about, for example, a father or mother killing their entire family. Now one cannot go through a day without hearing another example. I’m not saying that the news should not be reported, by using this example. I am pointing out that the news all by its self is over stimulating because of these events in these awful times, so why in the world is fuel being added to the fire of overstimulation on top of the sad reality? As I said, even in the worst of human times no child or adult experienced a relentless hour by hour day by day exposure to tragic real or imaginary over stimulation. Even work has become combative in modern times, with people having warlike analogies for their every day activities.
Think about that. If you could watch our “past TV” you’d notice that it’s not like the Smiths who grew corn on their acre imagined “marketing war” with the Jones who grew barley on their acre. Rather, even the Bible documents rules for how farmers should lend each other their tools. Yet we have corporations who are structured in totally warlike “free market competition” and individual “competitiveness” (look at the torture of the “human resources” departments with their “performance review system”) and you’ll see what I mean. I've spent years in corporate America and it is unrecognizable from where it was in the 1950’s where one could be competitive on one’s own initiative rather than competitive based on principles of looting, torture and war.
If you watched our “past TV” you’d see that generation after generation tried to do better for themselves and their family, not compete, loot and over stimulate. Farmer Smith would hope that next year he could extend his field another few feet in one direction in order to fit in another row of corn, and thus do a little better. Farmer Jones would hope that she could extend irrigation to another part of her field, and thus ride out times of low rain better. They didn’t plot against each other and instead they supported each other. Their kids did not go home believing that aliens talked to bug eyed Egyptians and played video games of how many they could slaughter. Humans simply are not meant to be as they are today; they are not meant to be like the moderns are today either spiritually or biologically, as “past TV” could show what kind of lifestyle and outlook humanity is evolved to be part of. Humanity is meant to be in a reality based incrementally improving standard of living that is individual, family and community based, punctuated by moderate stimulation as needed (times of crisis, sports, adventurers), and all revolving around one’s treasure of investment which is children, the present and the future.
To summarize, therefore, “past TV” would provide the following mental cleansing:
1) It would remind people that factual evidence exists to discern between what actually happened and the imaginary works of humans.
2) It would remind people that there is a tempo of life that people emerged and evolved into, and have now totally lost in the vast parts of modern society.
3) It would starkly demonstrate that modern humans have become paranoid and combative by their own choice and thus the imposition now of society, particularly modern workplace and “entertainment” ethos and that such an attitude never existed in even the most pained and troubled times of human history.
It is of the most desperate importance that everyone, individually and in our systems such as schools, return to a reality based process of learning and thinking. I hope I’ve provided one small but helpful visionary tool, where people can once in a while stop and think, “What would ‘past TV’ show us about what actually happened and how people genuinely lived?” You will develop a much refined and truer taste for everything, from intellectual to entertainment, if you do this, without losing any of the benefits and pleasures of genuine imagination, including for diversion.
What a mess.
:(
I’ve noticed that this modern society is very much into “cleansers,” usually for imaginary “detoxing” reasons, including the puzzling popularity of “colonics.” Well, detoxing and cleansing are of course worthy and important concepts in general, so here are a mental and spiritual cleansing exercise. Its purpose is to help people realign themselves into a more realistic perception of actual life and prudent separation from the depressive and paranoid imaginations that moderns now suffer from (and inflict on each other). This is also part of the faith and reason case studies, with a focus on regaining more authentic reasoning capabilities. Since it is a creative visualization exercise, you can also use this is part of my series on creative writing and arts exercises that focus on reality to provide positively imaginative and cutting edge creativity.
The basic premise of this story, this visualization, is that we are going to think of a scientifically and realistic, factual way to determine what actually happened each day in human history. In this story the reason that such a capability is created is that humans have lost the ability to look on their own past with any balance and reason. Here is an example of the problem. Some people are fascinated by ancient Indian cultures, such as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans, because they consider certain segments of their culture to be either “cool” or “enlightening and mystical.” Thus they think that because there are certain cultural developments in their pagan mythologies and supposed forecasting of world events and so forth through their calendars that are exciting, mysterious and cool that the whole society had undue merit. By “undue merit” I mean that rather than just appreciating that they were fellow human beings who raised children and did the best they could, they are given, by some people, a numinous elevation in their importance. In fact, this elevation obscures the very unpleasant facts of their bloody torture and sacrifice of thousands and thousands of innocent people, including infants. As schools have become less judgmental and more “politically correct,” young people are less exposed to the mundane realities of human history and as a result turn to the imaginary entertainment media and other “soothsayers” who focus on the “cool” parts of human history and ignore the rest. This has led modern society into an awful mess and the ability to reason for millions of people has been polluted and damaged.
So let us suppose that there is a factual and scientifically valid way to take someone who has such a viewpoint, put them into a room, and turn on a television that allows them to see what actually happened on any given day in, let’s say, an Aztec city. This would be an actual viewing of the minute by minute genuine activities as they occurred. So there would be many hours of footage of watching people just do their day to day lives, raising children and slogging and toiling in the fields.
Here is the scientific principle of how this would work. It is important to understand that there is a way that pure factual science could in theory provide this capability. It is important to have a factual and scientific approach as part of the mental cleansing exercise so that one does not imagine that “aliens” or “seers” “provide” this “gift.” It is that mindset, both conscious and unconscious, that has gotten society into this dire mess of toxic mentality. So here is the science. Most people know that we are able to see and hear things because energy is reflected and/or emitted outward where the ears and the eyes then “catch” that energy and therefore perceive what is happening. We also know that the light continues onward into space. This is how we see the stars, because their light travels long distances until it reaches our eyes. Many jokes have been made on this principle that imaginary aliens will someday receive the first beams of our first television programs and enjoy (or puzzle over) “Howdy Doody” and “I Love Lucy.” So using that scientific principle, let’s take it a step further and build a system where not just television and radio waves but all waves, light and sound, are picked up in space to provide a real time image of what was happening on the surface of the earth.
So imagine that a million light years from earth (the distance that light travels in a year) we had cameras that were so powerful that they could collect the light of everything that was actually happening on earth, and so refined that they could detect down to the individual human or animal’s activity. In other words it is like installing a powerful traffic live cam except the events have already taken place and these cameras are positioned far enough out in space to collect all this light. Similarly microphones would be installed so that all sounds that were ever emitted were captured and matched to the visual images. This is, of course, where the science breaks down since all light and all sound is not preserved indefinitely nor are they powerful enough to actually live on in space. If you drop a book in your house the people on the street do not hear it because the sound waves do not travel farther than the walls of your home. But for the purpose of this exercise, let us assume that it is possible to gather all of the light and sound waves that were ever emitted on earth and view/listen to them as a genuine live stream of what had actually happened minute by minute on earth.
Thus one could take an Aztec admirer and put him or her in a room that receives these transmissions and they could watch and see and listen to any particular day of events in a given location in that time. So the viewer could flip the dial and watch a selected location on a selected day. Remember, they are not “back there” “in time” as if in a supposed “time machine,” they are simply watching, like on TIVO, what had actually happened in the past.
Nothing would restore mental balance and sanity faster. Anyone could watch day after day of reality, the boring mundane existence of people who had to labor for the food that they ate. However, one would also see that the one joy that people had was their children. People could watch day after day, year after year of this “television into the past” and essentially observe as it happened the reality that life was difficult compared to today in that everyone had to labor long hours just to survive, growing their food, building shelter, obtaining water and heat and raising their children. People could then also observe that children were the one gift that everyone had and valued… children were the treasure that even the poorest could “afford.” Such observing would take the glamour out of the few minutes of prurient and occult activity and perception of the culture as a whole, and restore the luster of understanding that through the generations it was children that were the goal of all of day to day human activity. Children were the reward for living, and rich and poor both agreed and were able to share in that common perception of the priority of life.
Thus one could restore through this television into the past a dose of the day to day reality as it occurred, not as compressed summaries or sound bytes of the exciting and mysterious “bits.” Further, one can then debunk the mystery of how things happened. One would see that no alien spaceships arrived to “give” the Aztecs or the Mayans “their calendar.” They could flip the channel and watch those who worked on those labors scratch their heads and observe phenomena that they did not understand (such as the stars), and then assemble the “facts” of what they saw into theories of world view. We could see if maybe the calendar turned out the way it did because King Freddie the Stubborn was in charge and the palace astronomers knew that he wanted the calendar to turn out a certain way. We could see that maybe one of the court astronomers is nagged by his hag wife and thus is in a bad mood whenever he works on the calendar. He thinks it is funny that he carves one of the snake gods to look like her. And then flipping the channel the observer could see how very uncool the roundup of the month’s bloody sacrifice of village people really was.
So using this television into the past people could book time in the television room to see what really happened in life in the past. It would serve two purposes. One is the obvious exciting ability to see what is true. For example, one could dial in and see the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. One could see that slaves built the pyramids, not freaky aliens who flew in on a ship and told the slave masters what to do. So with the television into the past one could settle all sorts of debates about what actually happened and what did not. But more importantly, and you may not believe this but it is true, the second purpose would be to observe how human life is like watching paint dry. It is NOT about the supernatural and human power mongering moments that occur in a period of moments or days, or during the reigns of forgotten despots and kings. It is about millions of people at a time walking around doing what they have to do to survive in a day, and build a society where their children can at least live and eventually thrive.
This is why such a capability is so detoxing and mentally cleansing. It would counteract and refute the over stimulated and distorted “sound byte” and “visual byte,” say nothing of the “enlightenment byte” that has polluted modern faculties. Nothing would restore genuine balance more than watching, oh let’s say a million years, of early humans walking around picking berries and roots, hunting for animals to eat, finding caves to live in, and raising their children, and that’s it. A day of viewing would reveal exiting things such as what prehistoric animals existed and how humans got by in such a difficult life, but quickly one would see that the real message is the “typical day:” drink water where you can find it, lapping it like an animal, dig for roots, pick fruit, eat some leftover animal kill, shelter from the sun and from predators, carry your children. What an exciting “direct TV” package that would be! One could watch millions of days of people trudging along trying to survive and valuing their young (that’s their young, such as their children, not their youth, such as the lack of wrinkles).
One could see, as I mentioned, that Jesus Christ really existed. One could also watch the real Buddha sit under the real tree. One could see the miracles of Jesus, including, of course, his resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven. But the television would not ultimately give one faith in God, of course. All one can do is see and believe the reality of God’s prophets. One could look down on the Israelites and see the great Theophany of God on Mount Sinai as they did, where God descended like a thunderous cloud and appeared to Moses alone. But of course watching the real events does not infuse faith into one’s heart thousands of years later. That is the whole point of the scriptures: you have to have actually been there to feel that full infusion of belief. The Apostles repeatedly explain that in their writings that they saw all of this with their own eyes and participated. One of the early Church fathers wrote about people who had seen Jesus and been cured by him still being alive and witnessing to the reality many years later. When one is part of the day to day one receives the full infusion of belief because you are part of the reality. But even the most perfect TV that allows one to look back in time, even in the side by side minute by minute way, cannot give the same fullness of infusion of impact of the events and the faith that is engendered as having actually been there and participating. That is the entire point of genuine history: you study and believe the people who were actually there.
So now I’ve created almost a longing for this past TV capability among you, I would guess. That is a good thing even though it cannot be technically fulfilled. That craving can be satisfied as it always was traditionally, until these modern dreadful times, which is through study and discernment of the facts, using faith and reasoning. There is a plentitude of literature by those who lived, for example, during the time of Jesus, the decades after Jesus, the hundred years after Jesus, and the two hundred years after Jesus. Moderns can actually read the facts of what people said, saw and believed and then decide on the impact on their faith. Instead we have people running around thinking that either nothing can be believed or everything can be believed as having actually happened, or worse, “could have happened.” I’ve pointed out in this post and other previous postings that there is a vast difference between the facts of real people who lived and existed, such as Jesus Christ, the Buddha, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and giving equal credence to writings that are mythologies (such as the fictional Greek and Roman pantheon of deities) and even worse than that, not reading any of the facts of who lived and what happened and making up by pulling out of one’s own mind and paranoia imaginary scenarios of “aliens” and so forth.
Sane thinking and sane living involve this order of progression:
1) Read and study factual accounts where they occur, whether writings or scientific records, such as fossils and geological formations.
2) Identify correctly those productions of humans that are pure imaginary that are done for cultural reasons and thus have value, of course, but are not factual.
3) Develop theories (called “hypotheses”) for the missing gaps, for what is not understood, but starting with the firm foundation of what is known and what can be reasonably inferred and deduced.
This used to be the way that individuals, groups and societies used to think and perceive reality. I am horrified to the very roots of my hair at how fewer and fewer people think in a clear, cleansed and factual way in these dreadful modern times. The imaginary has overthrown and distorted the reality.
Why has this happened? The obvious two reasons are that prosperity has separated too many power brokers from the reality and tempo of actual life, life that used to center around survival first and prosperity second. The second reason is that entertainment media has taken over the thought process of the vast majority of people, also the result of prosperity. People no longer value facts and reasoning, all they care about is “imagining,” “escapism” (which then becomes their new and horrible reality) and artificial or extreme sensation seeking. Any given hour of modern media gives more stimulation than an entire year of actual life would have among even the Aztecs. That is what has been totally lost in the modern psyche and what our theoretical “past TV” would provide the instant cure for.
So what do we do? We have to get back to genuine reality of perceptions within a reasonable tempo of life. Humans never lived in a time where our children, for example, can experience a daily diet of overstimulation. Even in the most dreadful times of war, for example, in human history, the vast majority of people had to plod each day to the fields to tend to the crops, their herds of animals and their children. No human ever experienced a daily or even a monthly or yearly diet of over stimulation as do our children and adults in just one hour of video games, television viewing, celebrity antics or the news, which contains so much that is dreadful. I’m not calling for censuring, but rather an understanding of times that have passed. It used to be, when I was young, that one could go a year without hearing about, for example, a father or mother killing their entire family. Now one cannot go through a day without hearing another example. I’m not saying that the news should not be reported, by using this example. I am pointing out that the news all by its self is over stimulating because of these events in these awful times, so why in the world is fuel being added to the fire of overstimulation on top of the sad reality? As I said, even in the worst of human times no child or adult experienced a relentless hour by hour day by day exposure to tragic real or imaginary over stimulation. Even work has become combative in modern times, with people having warlike analogies for their every day activities.
Think about that. If you could watch our “past TV” you’d notice that it’s not like the Smiths who grew corn on their acre imagined “marketing war” with the Jones who grew barley on their acre. Rather, even the Bible documents rules for how farmers should lend each other their tools. Yet we have corporations who are structured in totally warlike “free market competition” and individual “competitiveness” (look at the torture of the “human resources” departments with their “performance review system”) and you’ll see what I mean. I've spent years in corporate America and it is unrecognizable from where it was in the 1950’s where one could be competitive on one’s own initiative rather than competitive based on principles of looting, torture and war.
If you watched our “past TV” you’d see that generation after generation tried to do better for themselves and their family, not compete, loot and over stimulate. Farmer Smith would hope that next year he could extend his field another few feet in one direction in order to fit in another row of corn, and thus do a little better. Farmer Jones would hope that she could extend irrigation to another part of her field, and thus ride out times of low rain better. They didn’t plot against each other and instead they supported each other. Their kids did not go home believing that aliens talked to bug eyed Egyptians and played video games of how many they could slaughter. Humans simply are not meant to be as they are today; they are not meant to be like the moderns are today either spiritually or biologically, as “past TV” could show what kind of lifestyle and outlook humanity is evolved to be part of. Humanity is meant to be in a reality based incrementally improving standard of living that is individual, family and community based, punctuated by moderate stimulation as needed (times of crisis, sports, adventurers), and all revolving around one’s treasure of investment which is children, the present and the future.
To summarize, therefore, “past TV” would provide the following mental cleansing:
1) It would remind people that factual evidence exists to discern between what actually happened and the imaginary works of humans.
2) It would remind people that there is a tempo of life that people emerged and evolved into, and have now totally lost in the vast parts of modern society.
3) It would starkly demonstrate that modern humans have become paranoid and combative by their own choice and thus the imposition now of society, particularly modern workplace and “entertainment” ethos and that such an attitude never existed in even the most pained and troubled times of human history.
It is of the most desperate importance that everyone, individually and in our systems such as schools, return to a reality based process of learning and thinking. I hope I’ve provided one small but helpful visionary tool, where people can once in a while stop and think, “What would ‘past TV’ show us about what actually happened and how people genuinely lived?” You will develop a much refined and truer taste for everything, from intellectual to entertainment, if you do this, without losing any of the benefits and pleasures of genuine imagination, including for diversion.
What a mess.
:(
Monday, January 19, 2009
Case study: religion of the American Presidents
Listening to the, in general, very good coverage of pre-inauguration commentary, I realize that there is something I need to explain that has been kind of purged out of public school education. So this is in particular directed toward the young people so they can appreciate even more their own historic and faith heritage.
On FOX news they commented, correctly, that American Presidents have typically had a Protestant faith background and belief system. They also correctly pointed out that Catholics were a minority in American faith history and government until relatively recently. However, one could draw the wrong conclusions from these two facts so this is why I want to give you the brief history.
Remember that humans have not shopped around for the “correct” religion until the past forty years. But that does not mean that mean old religion was “forced” on individuals either. Like a heritage one’s religion was loved and passed along to the next generation, like an inheritance. Thus entire countries tended to have the same religion, not because it was imposed on them, or because they all “chose” the same “most correct” religion, but because each family generation after generation passed along their faith, and that tended to be along the lines of countries or large regions since, obviously, that’s how cultures group at the largest scale.
Thus when you look at America you are both correct to say that it was “mostly Protestant” in its founding, but you are incorrect if you are referring to the landscape, the actual land mass, of America. The English and the Dutch brought along Protestantism, their historic faiths. But the Spanish and the French brought along Catholicism, their historic faith. Wherever in American the French and Spanish settled, those were Catholic areas, not Protestant. The Spanish settled the west of America, much of the south, all of Mexico and all of the countries of what would be central and South America, and that is why they are Catholic. So, actually, in terms of land mass, and in terms of millions who converted to a Christian faith, Catholicism is the “invisible” majority in terms of North, central and South America and was even during the Revolution. Remember: the American Revolution was against England, where the English colonies broke away. So of course it was all Protestant (and legacy Dutch, who were the earliest settlers of regions such as New York City). It’s not like the Spanish colonies joined in with the English colonies to declare independence from England because the Spanish colonies “reported to” Spain, obviously. So while the Revolution of the states was taking place, under its faith umbrella of its heritage of Protestantism, it’s not like Catholics weren’t here. They were here, of course, in the millions, in the Spanish and French (such as around New Orleans) colonies that were never part of the English colonies, obviously!
So it’s not like America was founded by the Americans who “picked” the ‘best’ religion. America was founded by English subjects rebelling against English rulers and they were all Protestants. The Dutch were Protestants by choice; they, as a culture, embraced Protestantism. The English, however, had Protestantism forced upon them by King Henry VIII. He, wishing to divorce his wife and marry another, and not getting permission from the Pope, wrested the entire country away from Catholicism. England used to be devout Catholic, like Ireland. King Henry VIII, in order to “have an heir” wanted to put aside his first wife, contrary to Catholic doctrine. So he established a Protestant church, called the Church of England, which is the origin of the Anglican and Episcopal denominations. So everyone who runs around today worshipping in Anglican and Episcopal churches does so because Henry VIII forbade Catholicism, burning down churches and monasteries, killing priests, and forcing conversions. It’s not like people sat down with Protestant and Catholic doctrine side by side and “made a choice” “which was the one for me” or “which was the most ‘correct’” or “most liberal.” That is why in doctrine and liturgy there is still much of the Catholic within the Anglican and Episcopal and why the churches have a special relationship regarding their core Christian theology, despite the introduction of secular sexual and social agenda into segments of the Church of England.
So yes, the American Presidents and Founding Fathers had deep faith, all of it manifested in Protestant denominations, but you need to understand it is precisely because they were English subjects rebelling against English, all of whom were forced to convert to Protestantism nearly two hundred years previous to the American Revolution. The Spanish colonies of the west and south, and the French colonies of the north (Quebec most notably) and the south (New Orleans, and areas of the Caribbean) were all numerous and matter of fact Catholics, based on their over one thousand years of Catholicism in their cultures and families. But the structure of the new United States was formulated by English subjects against English rulership; hence it is rooted in Christianity of the Protestant denominations and viewpoint. Thus it took years of new immigrants who were Catholic, the Irish, the Germans, the Polish, for example, to bring grassroots Catholicism into the eastern and Midwestern part of the growing America. President John F Kennedy, the first and only Catholic president, was the son of the line of Irish Catholics who became mainstreamed into the Protestant power structure of the United States. But that doesn’t mean this was when “Catholics” “arrived” and “were tolerated” by Protestants. Um, all of the west of the United States that was under Spanish influence were already Catholic and were there before many of the Protestant explorers and settlers.
George Washington: Episcopalian
John Adams: Unitarian
Thomas Jefferson: none declared but a Christian believer
James Madison: Episcopalian
James Monroe: Episcopalian
John Quincy Adams: Unitarian (like dad, John Adams)
Andrew Jackson: Presbyterian
Martin Van Buren: Dutch Reformed (see, he, the 8th President, is scion of the very early Dutch
Protestant heritage in the Dutch colonies)
William Henry Harrison: Episcopalian
John Tyler: Episcopalian
(So now you’ve had ten Presidents, where five of the ten were Episcopalians and it’s not like each President sat down like moderns seem to assume and went, “Hmm, which is the ‘best religion.’” This continues to be the legacy of English colonies having rebelled against an English rulership that was Protestant by culture and history, not by having “selected” the “best” “religion.” I mean you all have watched the great “John Adams” miniseries and seen how President 2 John Adams, Unitarian, raised son who became President 6 John Quincy Adams, in their family Unitarian faith!)
James Knox Polk: Presbyterian
Zachary Taylor: Episcopalian
Millard Fillmore: Unitarian
Franklin Pierce: Episcopalian
James Buchanan: Presbyterian
Abraham Lincoln: None declared but a Christian believer
Andrew Johnson: None (became President after Lincoln assassinated and had opposed all of Lincoln’s agenda, including racial equality)
Ulysses S. Grant: Methodist (The 18th President is the first one who was not Episcopalian, Presbyterian or Unitarian).
Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Methodist
James Abram Garfield: Disciples of Christ
(So you can see that it is not until the second half of the 1800’s that there was much diversity among the Protestant denominations themselves as represented by the Presidents. It’s not like the Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Unitarians were working to “keep out” the other Protestant denominations, say nothing of the Catholics. American government continued to be comprised of the descendants of those English colonists who rebelled against English rulership).
Chester Alan Arthur: Episcopalian
Stephen Grover Cleveland: Presbyterian
Benjamin Harrison: Presbyterian
William McKinley: Methodist
Theodore Roosevelt: Dutch Reformed, Episcopalian
William Howard Taft: Unitarian
Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Presbyterian
Warren Gamaliel Harding: Baptist (First Baptist! Yeah! Notice the first Baptist President did not happen until 1921).
John Calvin Coolidge: Congregationalist
(So you can see that the third set of ten Presidents, even with the first Baptist, was still very reflective of the traditional culture in power and in numbers, the Episcopalians and Presbyterians with touches of Unitarian and Dutch Reformed. It’s now been one hundred and fifty years since the American Revolution).
Again, you can see just by looking at the facts that it’s not like each President sat down as a young lad in college and said, “Hmm, which religion is the ‘right one’ because that’s the one I am going to be.” Religion is the legacy and treasured inheritance passed along in their family within the community, cultural and national context of people with the same heritage and thus values.
Herbert Clark Hoover: Society of Friends (Quaker)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Episcopalian
Harry S. Truman: Baptist (Yeah! The nation’s second Baptist President).
Dwight David Eisenhower: Presbyterian
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Roman Catholic
Lyndon Baines Johnson: Disciples of Christ
Richard Milhous Nixon: Society of Friends (Quaker)
Gerald Rudolph Ford: Episcopalian
James Earl Carter: Baptist
Ronald Wilson Reagan: Baptized Disciples of Christ, later attended Presbyterian churches (according to Wikipedia)
(The fourth set of ten Presidents again demonstrates that the faith of the Presidents is not a cynically chosen one, but the legacy of their families’ heritage and cultural context and upbringing).
George Herbert Walker Bush: Episcopalian
William Jefferson Clinton: Baptist
George Walker Bush: Methodist
I hope as we celebrate the inauguration of President Barrack Obama that everyone uses this as an opportunity to have a more accurate and less factionalized view of the secular and faith history of the United States. It is only in the past forty years that people have come to think of faith as a “choice” of the “most correct” and “best ‘for me’” “decision,” and fine, think that way if you want, though that misses the whole point of families passing on witness to their faith, but don’t look back on the “role” of faith in the United States in that context, because that is simply factually wrong. The United States was founded on principles and belief in God because that is the spine-the backbone-of the people who comprise the country in the first place: people of faith.
Thus when people select, for example, inauguration speakers and so forth according to their faith they totally miss the point of the faith heritage of the United States. For example, it doesn’t matter if President Elect Obama has a Catholic there or not: many Catholics voted for him and all Catholics, including the Pope, pray for him and his success. This assignment of mouths and fanny occupying seats as statements of some sort of agenda is so bogus and contrary to the authentic history of the United States. I mean, I’m a Roman Catholic and you don’t see me whining that most of the Presidents were Episcopalian. It’s not a bingo score card, folks. Pray that whatever the President’s faith is, that it is orthodox and sincere.
I hope that you have found this helpful. I call this a case study because I am also showing to you how to take an assumption that you have and use some simple visual and research tools to make the facts and context more understandable. In this case all you needed was to hear from me what used to be taught in schools (the facts about how culture and faith migrated around the world) and a tool, which is to look at the denominations of each President in groups of ten as a way to clump meaningful groups of time since the American Revolution. Organizing like this is an easier way to analyze, learn and even memorize, if that is your intention.
On FOX news they commented, correctly, that American Presidents have typically had a Protestant faith background and belief system. They also correctly pointed out that Catholics were a minority in American faith history and government until relatively recently. However, one could draw the wrong conclusions from these two facts so this is why I want to give you the brief history.
Remember that humans have not shopped around for the “correct” religion until the past forty years. But that does not mean that mean old religion was “forced” on individuals either. Like a heritage one’s religion was loved and passed along to the next generation, like an inheritance. Thus entire countries tended to have the same religion, not because it was imposed on them, or because they all “chose” the same “most correct” religion, but because each family generation after generation passed along their faith, and that tended to be along the lines of countries or large regions since, obviously, that’s how cultures group at the largest scale.
Thus when you look at America you are both correct to say that it was “mostly Protestant” in its founding, but you are incorrect if you are referring to the landscape, the actual land mass, of America. The English and the Dutch brought along Protestantism, their historic faiths. But the Spanish and the French brought along Catholicism, their historic faith. Wherever in American the French and Spanish settled, those were Catholic areas, not Protestant. The Spanish settled the west of America, much of the south, all of Mexico and all of the countries of what would be central and South America, and that is why they are Catholic. So, actually, in terms of land mass, and in terms of millions who converted to a Christian faith, Catholicism is the “invisible” majority in terms of North, central and South America and was even during the Revolution. Remember: the American Revolution was against England, where the English colonies broke away. So of course it was all Protestant (and legacy Dutch, who were the earliest settlers of regions such as New York City). It’s not like the Spanish colonies joined in with the English colonies to declare independence from England because the Spanish colonies “reported to” Spain, obviously. So while the Revolution of the states was taking place, under its faith umbrella of its heritage of Protestantism, it’s not like Catholics weren’t here. They were here, of course, in the millions, in the Spanish and French (such as around New Orleans) colonies that were never part of the English colonies, obviously!
So it’s not like America was founded by the Americans who “picked” the ‘best’ religion. America was founded by English subjects rebelling against English rulers and they were all Protestants. The Dutch were Protestants by choice; they, as a culture, embraced Protestantism. The English, however, had Protestantism forced upon them by King Henry VIII. He, wishing to divorce his wife and marry another, and not getting permission from the Pope, wrested the entire country away from Catholicism. England used to be devout Catholic, like Ireland. King Henry VIII, in order to “have an heir” wanted to put aside his first wife, contrary to Catholic doctrine. So he established a Protestant church, called the Church of England, which is the origin of the Anglican and Episcopal denominations. So everyone who runs around today worshipping in Anglican and Episcopal churches does so because Henry VIII forbade Catholicism, burning down churches and monasteries, killing priests, and forcing conversions. It’s not like people sat down with Protestant and Catholic doctrine side by side and “made a choice” “which was the one for me” or “which was the most ‘correct’” or “most liberal.” That is why in doctrine and liturgy there is still much of the Catholic within the Anglican and Episcopal and why the churches have a special relationship regarding their core Christian theology, despite the introduction of secular sexual and social agenda into segments of the Church of England.
So yes, the American Presidents and Founding Fathers had deep faith, all of it manifested in Protestant denominations, but you need to understand it is precisely because they were English subjects rebelling against English, all of whom were forced to convert to Protestantism nearly two hundred years previous to the American Revolution. The Spanish colonies of the west and south, and the French colonies of the north (Quebec most notably) and the south (New Orleans, and areas of the Caribbean) were all numerous and matter of fact Catholics, based on their over one thousand years of Catholicism in their cultures and families. But the structure of the new United States was formulated by English subjects against English rulership; hence it is rooted in Christianity of the Protestant denominations and viewpoint. Thus it took years of new immigrants who were Catholic, the Irish, the Germans, the Polish, for example, to bring grassroots Catholicism into the eastern and Midwestern part of the growing America. President John F Kennedy, the first and only Catholic president, was the son of the line of Irish Catholics who became mainstreamed into the Protestant power structure of the United States. But that doesn’t mean this was when “Catholics” “arrived” and “were tolerated” by Protestants. Um, all of the west of the United States that was under Spanish influence were already Catholic and were there before many of the Protestant explorers and settlers.
George Washington: Episcopalian
John Adams: Unitarian
Thomas Jefferson: none declared but a Christian believer
James Madison: Episcopalian
James Monroe: Episcopalian
John Quincy Adams: Unitarian (like dad, John Adams)
Andrew Jackson: Presbyterian
Martin Van Buren: Dutch Reformed (see, he, the 8th President, is scion of the very early Dutch
Protestant heritage in the Dutch colonies)
William Henry Harrison: Episcopalian
John Tyler: Episcopalian
(So now you’ve had ten Presidents, where five of the ten were Episcopalians and it’s not like each President sat down like moderns seem to assume and went, “Hmm, which is the ‘best religion.’” This continues to be the legacy of English colonies having rebelled against an English rulership that was Protestant by culture and history, not by having “selected” the “best” “religion.” I mean you all have watched the great “John Adams” miniseries and seen how President 2 John Adams, Unitarian, raised son who became President 6 John Quincy Adams, in their family Unitarian faith!)
James Knox Polk: Presbyterian
Zachary Taylor: Episcopalian
Millard Fillmore: Unitarian
Franklin Pierce: Episcopalian
James Buchanan: Presbyterian
Abraham Lincoln: None declared but a Christian believer
Andrew Johnson: None (became President after Lincoln assassinated and had opposed all of Lincoln’s agenda, including racial equality)
Ulysses S. Grant: Methodist (The 18th President is the first one who was not Episcopalian, Presbyterian or Unitarian).
Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Methodist
James Abram Garfield: Disciples of Christ
(So you can see that it is not until the second half of the 1800’s that there was much diversity among the Protestant denominations themselves as represented by the Presidents. It’s not like the Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Unitarians were working to “keep out” the other Protestant denominations, say nothing of the Catholics. American government continued to be comprised of the descendants of those English colonists who rebelled against English rulership).
Chester Alan Arthur: Episcopalian
Stephen Grover Cleveland: Presbyterian
Benjamin Harrison: Presbyterian
William McKinley: Methodist
Theodore Roosevelt: Dutch Reformed, Episcopalian
William Howard Taft: Unitarian
Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Presbyterian
Warren Gamaliel Harding: Baptist (First Baptist! Yeah! Notice the first Baptist President did not happen until 1921).
John Calvin Coolidge: Congregationalist
(So you can see that the third set of ten Presidents, even with the first Baptist, was still very reflective of the traditional culture in power and in numbers, the Episcopalians and Presbyterians with touches of Unitarian and Dutch Reformed. It’s now been one hundred and fifty years since the American Revolution).
Again, you can see just by looking at the facts that it’s not like each President sat down as a young lad in college and said, “Hmm, which religion is the ‘right one’ because that’s the one I am going to be.” Religion is the legacy and treasured inheritance passed along in their family within the community, cultural and national context of people with the same heritage and thus values.
Herbert Clark Hoover: Society of Friends (Quaker)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Episcopalian
Harry S. Truman: Baptist (Yeah! The nation’s second Baptist President).
Dwight David Eisenhower: Presbyterian
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Roman Catholic
Lyndon Baines Johnson: Disciples of Christ
Richard Milhous Nixon: Society of Friends (Quaker)
Gerald Rudolph Ford: Episcopalian
James Earl Carter: Baptist
Ronald Wilson Reagan: Baptized Disciples of Christ, later attended Presbyterian churches (according to Wikipedia)
(The fourth set of ten Presidents again demonstrates that the faith of the Presidents is not a cynically chosen one, but the legacy of their families’ heritage and cultural context and upbringing).
George Herbert Walker Bush: Episcopalian
William Jefferson Clinton: Baptist
George Walker Bush: Methodist
I hope as we celebrate the inauguration of President Barrack Obama that everyone uses this as an opportunity to have a more accurate and less factionalized view of the secular and faith history of the United States. It is only in the past forty years that people have come to think of faith as a “choice” of the “most correct” and “best ‘for me’” “decision,” and fine, think that way if you want, though that misses the whole point of families passing on witness to their faith, but don’t look back on the “role” of faith in the United States in that context, because that is simply factually wrong. The United States was founded on principles and belief in God because that is the spine-the backbone-of the people who comprise the country in the first place: people of faith.
Thus when people select, for example, inauguration speakers and so forth according to their faith they totally miss the point of the faith heritage of the United States. For example, it doesn’t matter if President Elect Obama has a Catholic there or not: many Catholics voted for him and all Catholics, including the Pope, pray for him and his success. This assignment of mouths and fanny occupying seats as statements of some sort of agenda is so bogus and contrary to the authentic history of the United States. I mean, I’m a Roman Catholic and you don’t see me whining that most of the Presidents were Episcopalian. It’s not a bingo score card, folks. Pray that whatever the President’s faith is, that it is orthodox and sincere.
I hope that you have found this helpful. I call this a case study because I am also showing to you how to take an assumption that you have and use some simple visual and research tools to make the facts and context more understandable. In this case all you needed was to hear from me what used to be taught in schools (the facts about how culture and faith migrated around the world) and a tool, which is to look at the denominations of each President in groups of ten as a way to clump meaningful groups of time since the American Revolution. Organizing like this is an easier way to analyze, learn and even memorize, if that is your intention.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Understanding God: Who gets into heaven? (2)
Part Two
Too many modern people go religion or “spirituality” “shopping.” These people have the mentality that a human being, especially an intelligent and “enlightened” one as themselves (if they are “humble” they call themselves “seekers”) can either 1) determine “which belief” is the “most accurate one” and/or 2) “which belief” will get them to heaven or a better position in whatever worldview they believe in. Here is the problem with this theory. One is not starting out on an “even footing” among all faiths, as if they are all perfectly good looking jeans but you are selecting the size that “fits you.” All of the different “beliefs” are NOT on an “equal footing” because God has had different types of relationships with communities throughout history, and it is communities that codify their belief systems. In other words, God has a consistent relationship with individuals, a personal relationship (after all, everyone has a soul created by God and a guardian angel, whether they believe in God or not, or have never even heard of God). But communities gather and codify collective “beliefs” and of course God is not providing them with their belief; that is what has come out of the past where humans grappled to assemble a world view out of the three components I listed in the first post on this subject. But then everything changed because God made himself known to ONE group of people, his chosen. No longer are the “beliefs” of others gathered from guesses about supernatural powers combined with human based creations myths, centered on speculation about the natural landscape in which communities abide. God made himself known to ONE group of people and further, embarked on a side by side witnessed relationship that is documented with facts for hundreds of years.
So it is an error to believe that one can “shop around” among “beliefs” because the only belief systems that are valid so far as your “accuracy” criterion are those based on the events of God’s relationship with humans as documented in the Bible. Notice I am not saying that one cannot get to heaven otherwise (the second criterion) and so let’s put that aside for the moment and just discuss the “accuracy” objective. No belief system that is not based on the faith history of the factual events documented between God and his chosen can be considered “correct” by any stretch of the imagination. They are all human produced stories and beliefs, worthy or not. The ancient polytheistic faiths emerged from humans having a shared gift of wanting to know God, but limited abilities to do so until God made himself explicitly and specifically known to them in return. Therefore if one is “shopping” for “accuracy” one cannot consider a belief that is not Judaism, Christianity or Islam. The Abrahamic faiths are all rooted in the actual documented dialogue and covenant between God’s chosen and God.
When we use the term “chosen” or “elect” we certainly don’t mean smarter, more holy or more moral than all the rest of people. One doesn’t have to go too far in reading the Bible to understand that. The Israelites were dancing around worshipping a golden calf as Moses was just a few miles away receiving the Ten Commandments from God in person. The term “chosen” means these are the people that God selected, as in “chose,” to reveal himself to and to establish an ongoing relationship that is God given and thus accurate, not based on human invention or speculation. God’s first choice was to covenant with all of humans, and that was through Adam and Eve. Their inability to obey and not in a minor area but in the worse of all areas, wanting to be like God and command good and evil, was humanity’s first chance and first fail. Therefore while they are the faith ancestors and their faithful descendents maintained knowledge of God and piety, the second chance that God gave was to select the people, the tribe, the individuals with whom he would lay down a many-generational relationship that would provide guidance for all humans, starting with the events written in the Torah.
Thus God had relationships with the series of patriarchs and prophets that were the continuity of year after year of his consistent face among them, concern and presence. Remember that writing per se did not exist in those days, so it’s not like the patriarchs and prophets were able to keep diaries of their relationship with God. But two things happened: 1) they, as all primitive people, memorized and kept oral history, passing each carefully to their next generations and 2) God provided Moses with the knowledge of all that had gone before and how to record these events in what would become the foundation of the Torah-the Pentateuch-the “Five Books of Moses.” Here is one modern way to think of Moses. When one uses a computer and a word processor, it is a program that has pre-established formats where one can create documents. When one sits to write it’s not like you have to invent for yourself the idea of an alphabet, numbers, paper, language, sentences, etc. We all have reached a common understanding of how written communications work, and a word processor makes it consistent in terms of results. Moses provided the first “template” of how to document in writing the events in faith history, of the ongoing and very real relationship and interaction between the chosen people and God. Thus among the many things that Moses did, and how great he was in God’s eyes, one of them you need to understand is that Moses himself was guided by God to take their relationship out of the oral history and put it in writing as witness for future generations.
Once this revelation was made, that God not only wants but co-authors, in a manner of speaking, the written documentation of God’s relationship with the chosen, it does not really matter whose actual quill is put to the parchment. Scribes abounded from the earliest times of writing and yes, they took “dictation.” What mattered is that Moses created the “template” by which only events that are of God (involving God’s relationship with the chosen) are included and that they must be “witnessed” events. By witnessed we mean that the events are attested to following the God given directives of how to observe and assert the truth of the matter. Jesus has a very lengthy comment about the difference between human witnessing (asserting the truth of the matter following the witness rules) and God witnessing, which is that God’s intervention is obvious and thus God himself is witnessing to the accuracy of his prophet. Jesus was irked but did not lose his temper when questioned by the scribes and Pharisees about how he could “witness to himself” because Jesus understood that they were speaking from disbelief, yes, but also the caution of having dutifully followed the “template” that Moses had first provided for documenting their relationship with God. I’ll include that passage later, but do not want to lose the train of thought in this location.
So Moses is the author of the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament of the Bible and what is the Pentateuch of the Torah. By “author” we mean that he developed the “format” that all others will emulate when “adding books to the Bible” (although of course it was not a sequential writing process) and Moses provided the information God gave to him about events that transpired before there was written history, from the moment of creation to their present time of the Exodus. Many different physical hands, of course, copy the books of the Bible generation after generation and indeed it is likely that Moses was far to busy to actually put quill to parchment of every word himself. But the template was established that only the truthful and the witnessed (either by humans or by God) could be recorded, and that it would be written with great diligence of names, places and dates in faith history being recorded. The Old Testament has therefore always been a combination of secular and faith history events. That is why one cannot “faith shop” among different “beliefs” because there is no equivalent to the Old Testament of the Bible, as God did not elect to reveal himself to any other community.
To give you better understanding of the continuity of this dialogue, here is a much summarized timetable for sections of the Old Testament. The events described in the beginning of faith history, from creation to Adam to Eve and their offspring all, obviously occurred before writing was developed, and thus occurred more than three thousand years before the Christian Era, thus at least five thousand years ago. The period of the Patriarchs (what is described in Genesis 12-50) is also before written history and occurred two thousand years to around thirteen hundred years before the Christian era. Thus during the time of Moses and the Exodus, around thirteen to twelve hundred years before the Christian era, Moses received from God understanding of what had transpired during the previous two thousand or so years of God’s relationship with his elect and first had this history transcribed. When Moses died Aaron and his descendants added the last moments of Moses to the writings and then from that point carried on in the template of documenting the faith history as it occurred. Thus the next book after the first five books of Moses is called Josue (Joshua), named after a successor of Moses and picks up where the books leave off in recording the conquest, division and occupation of Chanaan by the Israelites under his leadership. Most likely the book is a combination of actual writing by Joshua and the later putting of quill to scroll of events based on oral memory.
Now, it’s not like people kept the Bible in one place and “added” the books to it in sequence after the Pentateuch. Here is where the word processing template analogy is handy. What the Israelites now had was a faith template. They knew that it was not only allowable to record faith history but an imperative given to them by God. Thus the priests and prophets had what one could call a spiritual template based on the Torah, the first five books, whereby they copied and emulated the recording of both secular and faith events. Thus the next book after Joshua, The Book of Judges, is a compilation of the events regarding twelve military leaders of Israel in the time between the death of Joshua and the establishment of the monarchy in Israel. Thus scribes “followed the template” and recorded the secular and divine events of this period, again, probably a combination of some being written “on the scene” and the rest committed to oral memory until it could be compiled and synthesized into the book. Judges covers a period of about two hundred years. The next books of the Bible then record the establishment of the consecrated monarchy in Israel, another period of several hundred years. This is how each book was written to correspond to actual secular and faith events during a period of time, and then following the “template” of Moses, at some point put into writing in a scroll or parchment. The most recent pre Christian era book of the Old Testament was written only one or two hundred years before Christ.
Therefore, it is important to understand that what Christians call the Old Testament is a compilation of books written to document actual secular and faith events, where God is consistently present throughout in an active participatory manner, for over thirteen hundred thousand years of actual writing, of scribing. There is no other “belief system” or “faith” that documents the active participation by God in a perfectly consistent fashion (it’s the same God with the same expectations year after year and generation after generation) paired with the actual secular historical events. The Bible is not an “option;” it is the documented secular and faith history of the people who are the elect of God, whether one chooses to “believe” or not.
Now, to understand the Qur’an, think of my analogy of the template, and also of how God had to “catch Moses up” with all that had happened that was true in the thousands of years of faith history before the Exodus. God had to “catch up” the people who would become the Muslims that they too were of the heritage of the elect that their physical and spiritual forefathers trace back to Adam and Eve and through Abraham to Ishmael and where they are today. The Prophet (PBUH) was like Moses in that regard of getting the divine revelation that was catching them up to realizing they have the same heritage. God gives them their own “template” and that is the Qur’an. Instead of being a template for future writings, since there is no addition to the Qur’an nor will there be, this template is to rediscover their sacred sites, such as those established by Abraham, and the template of worshipful behavior. That is why the shared faith history of Jews/Christians and Muslims is highly summarized in the Qur’an. The Qur’an in that regard is a “catch up” of what had gone before and is shared, but provided so that the spiritual template of the Qur’an for those who believe to have context and understanding of God. Thus the Qur’an touches on spiritual history from Adam and Eve to Jesus Christ, establishing for Muslims the lineage of the prophets.
Why did God do it this way? Because this is the only way that God can reveal himself to humans but also preserve their free will and freedom of choice. If God wanted to love preprogrammed obedient robots he would have invented those in the first place instead of allowing humans to arise from the clay. It’s not love if it has to be forced, and God forces no one to love him. It is, however, a really good idea to love God. Why? Because one cannot truly love fellow human beings, either as intimates or friends, or the community of “neighbors” if one does not love God because God is the source of all authentic love. However, this is why you need to have faith that throughout history those who did not know about God but who loved life, their family and their neighbors, and who had genuine charity would somehow be taken care of by God when it is their time to pass. God is wherever there is genuine love and people do not have to “wait” to love one another in his name. That is why one must have faith that those who “fell asleep” who were righteous but who did not know God or know of him are treated with the perfection of discernment of doing what is right for them in eternity that only God possesses.
Everything changes, however, as humans demand to control good and evil, and to use their “free choice” to make their “own decisions” about what is “right and wrong.” No longer are humans like the early childlike humans, who struggle to survive and who have to do the best that they can in their lives, and then fall into sleep in God when they die, if they have been good and righteous. This is why God made two “interventions,” to use a modern term often used to describe the beginning of rehab. One is the intervention of his elect, his chosen people, where God makes himself known and is “living” side by side with them so that they can know God, fear God (fear in the sense I’ve explained in the gifts of the Holy Spirit) and provide the gift of witness, the scripture, that is the truth and expectations of God and his people, humans. The second intervention is Jesus Christ, the Savior. This is so that the doorway to God and the pathway (one that each person must choose to walk, because with the knowledge of good and evil no one is just going to roll their way into heaven like the “kind Neanderthal”) to God can be opened to all, and not just to his elect.
Conclusion of Part Two.
Matthew 21:23-27
And when he had come into the temple, the chief priests and elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority dost thou do these things? And who gave thee this authority?” Jesus answered and said to them, “I also will ask you one question, and if you answer me this, I in turn will tell you by what authority I do these things. Whence was the baptism of John? From heaven, or from men?”
But they began arguing among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the people, for all regard John as a prophet.” And they answered Jesus and said, “We do not know.” Then he in turn said to them, “Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.”
Too many modern people go religion or “spirituality” “shopping.” These people have the mentality that a human being, especially an intelligent and “enlightened” one as themselves (if they are “humble” they call themselves “seekers”) can either 1) determine “which belief” is the “most accurate one” and/or 2) “which belief” will get them to heaven or a better position in whatever worldview they believe in. Here is the problem with this theory. One is not starting out on an “even footing” among all faiths, as if they are all perfectly good looking jeans but you are selecting the size that “fits you.” All of the different “beliefs” are NOT on an “equal footing” because God has had different types of relationships with communities throughout history, and it is communities that codify their belief systems. In other words, God has a consistent relationship with individuals, a personal relationship (after all, everyone has a soul created by God and a guardian angel, whether they believe in God or not, or have never even heard of God). But communities gather and codify collective “beliefs” and of course God is not providing them with their belief; that is what has come out of the past where humans grappled to assemble a world view out of the three components I listed in the first post on this subject. But then everything changed because God made himself known to ONE group of people, his chosen. No longer are the “beliefs” of others gathered from guesses about supernatural powers combined with human based creations myths, centered on speculation about the natural landscape in which communities abide. God made himself known to ONE group of people and further, embarked on a side by side witnessed relationship that is documented with facts for hundreds of years.
So it is an error to believe that one can “shop around” among “beliefs” because the only belief systems that are valid so far as your “accuracy” criterion are those based on the events of God’s relationship with humans as documented in the Bible. Notice I am not saying that one cannot get to heaven otherwise (the second criterion) and so let’s put that aside for the moment and just discuss the “accuracy” objective. No belief system that is not based on the faith history of the factual events documented between God and his chosen can be considered “correct” by any stretch of the imagination. They are all human produced stories and beliefs, worthy or not. The ancient polytheistic faiths emerged from humans having a shared gift of wanting to know God, but limited abilities to do so until God made himself explicitly and specifically known to them in return. Therefore if one is “shopping” for “accuracy” one cannot consider a belief that is not Judaism, Christianity or Islam. The Abrahamic faiths are all rooted in the actual documented dialogue and covenant between God’s chosen and God.
When we use the term “chosen” or “elect” we certainly don’t mean smarter, more holy or more moral than all the rest of people. One doesn’t have to go too far in reading the Bible to understand that. The Israelites were dancing around worshipping a golden calf as Moses was just a few miles away receiving the Ten Commandments from God in person. The term “chosen” means these are the people that God selected, as in “chose,” to reveal himself to and to establish an ongoing relationship that is God given and thus accurate, not based on human invention or speculation. God’s first choice was to covenant with all of humans, and that was through Adam and Eve. Their inability to obey and not in a minor area but in the worse of all areas, wanting to be like God and command good and evil, was humanity’s first chance and first fail. Therefore while they are the faith ancestors and their faithful descendents maintained knowledge of God and piety, the second chance that God gave was to select the people, the tribe, the individuals with whom he would lay down a many-generational relationship that would provide guidance for all humans, starting with the events written in the Torah.
Thus God had relationships with the series of patriarchs and prophets that were the continuity of year after year of his consistent face among them, concern and presence. Remember that writing per se did not exist in those days, so it’s not like the patriarchs and prophets were able to keep diaries of their relationship with God. But two things happened: 1) they, as all primitive people, memorized and kept oral history, passing each carefully to their next generations and 2) God provided Moses with the knowledge of all that had gone before and how to record these events in what would become the foundation of the Torah-the Pentateuch-the “Five Books of Moses.” Here is one modern way to think of Moses. When one uses a computer and a word processor, it is a program that has pre-established formats where one can create documents. When one sits to write it’s not like you have to invent for yourself the idea of an alphabet, numbers, paper, language, sentences, etc. We all have reached a common understanding of how written communications work, and a word processor makes it consistent in terms of results. Moses provided the first “template” of how to document in writing the events in faith history, of the ongoing and very real relationship and interaction between the chosen people and God. Thus among the many things that Moses did, and how great he was in God’s eyes, one of them you need to understand is that Moses himself was guided by God to take their relationship out of the oral history and put it in writing as witness for future generations.
Once this revelation was made, that God not only wants but co-authors, in a manner of speaking, the written documentation of God’s relationship with the chosen, it does not really matter whose actual quill is put to the parchment. Scribes abounded from the earliest times of writing and yes, they took “dictation.” What mattered is that Moses created the “template” by which only events that are of God (involving God’s relationship with the chosen) are included and that they must be “witnessed” events. By witnessed we mean that the events are attested to following the God given directives of how to observe and assert the truth of the matter. Jesus has a very lengthy comment about the difference between human witnessing (asserting the truth of the matter following the witness rules) and God witnessing, which is that God’s intervention is obvious and thus God himself is witnessing to the accuracy of his prophet. Jesus was irked but did not lose his temper when questioned by the scribes and Pharisees about how he could “witness to himself” because Jesus understood that they were speaking from disbelief, yes, but also the caution of having dutifully followed the “template” that Moses had first provided for documenting their relationship with God. I’ll include that passage later, but do not want to lose the train of thought in this location.
So Moses is the author of the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament of the Bible and what is the Pentateuch of the Torah. By “author” we mean that he developed the “format” that all others will emulate when “adding books to the Bible” (although of course it was not a sequential writing process) and Moses provided the information God gave to him about events that transpired before there was written history, from the moment of creation to their present time of the Exodus. Many different physical hands, of course, copy the books of the Bible generation after generation and indeed it is likely that Moses was far to busy to actually put quill to parchment of every word himself. But the template was established that only the truthful and the witnessed (either by humans or by God) could be recorded, and that it would be written with great diligence of names, places and dates in faith history being recorded. The Old Testament has therefore always been a combination of secular and faith history events. That is why one cannot “faith shop” among different “beliefs” because there is no equivalent to the Old Testament of the Bible, as God did not elect to reveal himself to any other community.
To give you better understanding of the continuity of this dialogue, here is a much summarized timetable for sections of the Old Testament. The events described in the beginning of faith history, from creation to Adam to Eve and their offspring all, obviously occurred before writing was developed, and thus occurred more than three thousand years before the Christian Era, thus at least five thousand years ago. The period of the Patriarchs (what is described in Genesis 12-50) is also before written history and occurred two thousand years to around thirteen hundred years before the Christian era. Thus during the time of Moses and the Exodus, around thirteen to twelve hundred years before the Christian era, Moses received from God understanding of what had transpired during the previous two thousand or so years of God’s relationship with his elect and first had this history transcribed. When Moses died Aaron and his descendants added the last moments of Moses to the writings and then from that point carried on in the template of documenting the faith history as it occurred. Thus the next book after the first five books of Moses is called Josue (Joshua), named after a successor of Moses and picks up where the books leave off in recording the conquest, division and occupation of Chanaan by the Israelites under his leadership. Most likely the book is a combination of actual writing by Joshua and the later putting of quill to scroll of events based on oral memory.
Now, it’s not like people kept the Bible in one place and “added” the books to it in sequence after the Pentateuch. Here is where the word processing template analogy is handy. What the Israelites now had was a faith template. They knew that it was not only allowable to record faith history but an imperative given to them by God. Thus the priests and prophets had what one could call a spiritual template based on the Torah, the first five books, whereby they copied and emulated the recording of both secular and faith events. Thus the next book after Joshua, The Book of Judges, is a compilation of the events regarding twelve military leaders of Israel in the time between the death of Joshua and the establishment of the monarchy in Israel. Thus scribes “followed the template” and recorded the secular and divine events of this period, again, probably a combination of some being written “on the scene” and the rest committed to oral memory until it could be compiled and synthesized into the book. Judges covers a period of about two hundred years. The next books of the Bible then record the establishment of the consecrated monarchy in Israel, another period of several hundred years. This is how each book was written to correspond to actual secular and faith events during a period of time, and then following the “template” of Moses, at some point put into writing in a scroll or parchment. The most recent pre Christian era book of the Old Testament was written only one or two hundred years before Christ.
Therefore, it is important to understand that what Christians call the Old Testament is a compilation of books written to document actual secular and faith events, where God is consistently present throughout in an active participatory manner, for over thirteen hundred thousand years of actual writing, of scribing. There is no other “belief system” or “faith” that documents the active participation by God in a perfectly consistent fashion (it’s the same God with the same expectations year after year and generation after generation) paired with the actual secular historical events. The Bible is not an “option;” it is the documented secular and faith history of the people who are the elect of God, whether one chooses to “believe” or not.
Now, to understand the Qur’an, think of my analogy of the template, and also of how God had to “catch Moses up” with all that had happened that was true in the thousands of years of faith history before the Exodus. God had to “catch up” the people who would become the Muslims that they too were of the heritage of the elect that their physical and spiritual forefathers trace back to Adam and Eve and through Abraham to Ishmael and where they are today. The Prophet (PBUH) was like Moses in that regard of getting the divine revelation that was catching them up to realizing they have the same heritage. God gives them their own “template” and that is the Qur’an. Instead of being a template for future writings, since there is no addition to the Qur’an nor will there be, this template is to rediscover their sacred sites, such as those established by Abraham, and the template of worshipful behavior. That is why the shared faith history of Jews/Christians and Muslims is highly summarized in the Qur’an. The Qur’an in that regard is a “catch up” of what had gone before and is shared, but provided so that the spiritual template of the Qur’an for those who believe to have context and understanding of God. Thus the Qur’an touches on spiritual history from Adam and Eve to Jesus Christ, establishing for Muslims the lineage of the prophets.
Why did God do it this way? Because this is the only way that God can reveal himself to humans but also preserve their free will and freedom of choice. If God wanted to love preprogrammed obedient robots he would have invented those in the first place instead of allowing humans to arise from the clay. It’s not love if it has to be forced, and God forces no one to love him. It is, however, a really good idea to love God. Why? Because one cannot truly love fellow human beings, either as intimates or friends, or the community of “neighbors” if one does not love God because God is the source of all authentic love. However, this is why you need to have faith that throughout history those who did not know about God but who loved life, their family and their neighbors, and who had genuine charity would somehow be taken care of by God when it is their time to pass. God is wherever there is genuine love and people do not have to “wait” to love one another in his name. That is why one must have faith that those who “fell asleep” who were righteous but who did not know God or know of him are treated with the perfection of discernment of doing what is right for them in eternity that only God possesses.
Everything changes, however, as humans demand to control good and evil, and to use their “free choice” to make their “own decisions” about what is “right and wrong.” No longer are humans like the early childlike humans, who struggle to survive and who have to do the best that they can in their lives, and then fall into sleep in God when they die, if they have been good and righteous. This is why God made two “interventions,” to use a modern term often used to describe the beginning of rehab. One is the intervention of his elect, his chosen people, where God makes himself known and is “living” side by side with them so that they can know God, fear God (fear in the sense I’ve explained in the gifts of the Holy Spirit) and provide the gift of witness, the scripture, that is the truth and expectations of God and his people, humans. The second intervention is Jesus Christ, the Savior. This is so that the doorway to God and the pathway (one that each person must choose to walk, because with the knowledge of good and evil no one is just going to roll their way into heaven like the “kind Neanderthal”) to God can be opened to all, and not just to his elect.
Conclusion of Part Two.
Matthew 21:23-27
And when he had come into the temple, the chief priests and elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority dost thou do these things? And who gave thee this authority?” Jesus answered and said to them, “I also will ask you one question, and if you answer me this, I in turn will tell you by what authority I do these things. Whence was the baptism of John? From heaven, or from men?”
But they began arguing among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the people, for all regard John as a prophet.” And they answered Jesus and said, “We do not know.” Then he in turn said to them, “Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.”
Friday, October 31, 2008
Back when women resisted idolatry
I really enjoyed this commentary on how the women resisted and would not participate in the idolatry of the Golden Calf, maintaining their faith and purity to God while the men lost theirs. This really is a very insightful analysis of both that event in the Old Testament and also a reminder that women used to protect, rather than threaten, piety. Unfortunately today many women are the "temptresses" of being false prophets, carried away with desire for power and "mystery" through new age and occult beliefs, and so they are often eager to destroy, rather than preserve, a family's faith, whether Jewish or Christian. (I admit I almost did not read this commentary because it's very "moon calf" new age sounding introduction. Puhleeze.) But this is a very worthy read for its analysis of a time when women were truly praiseworthy as leaders of the faith. I wish they set the example of orthodox humility and devotion more nowadays as they did then, in the example of the Golden Calf.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1225199607644&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Oct 30, 2008 11:51
Kol Isha: When the women refused to strip off their finery
By RACHEL ADELMAN
The writer lectures in Hebrew Bible and midrash at Matan, the Sadie Rennert Institute for Women's Torah Studies, in Jerusalem, as well as internationally.
snip
In the context of the Golden Calf, the women refrained from contributing their finery (edyan) Later, in response to consequences of the sin, the people stripped off their finery [edyam] (Ex. 33:6) as a symbol of mourning. According to the Talmud, these were the crowns that the Israelites had gained with their declaration of faith at Sinai: "We shall do and then we shall hear/understand" [na'aseh venishma] (BT Shabbat 88a). Because the women did not contribute their jewels to the making of the molten calf, they maintained a loyalty to the original experience at Sinai; they never lost those precious crowns as a consequence of participating in idolatry. The jewels of their words bound them. They were thus rewarded with the Rosh Hodesh festival as the ultimate symbol of integrity, despite the vicissitudes of time.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1225199607644&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Oct 30, 2008 11:51
Kol Isha: When the women refused to strip off their finery
By RACHEL ADELMAN
The writer lectures in Hebrew Bible and midrash at Matan, the Sadie Rennert Institute for Women's Torah Studies, in Jerusalem, as well as internationally.
snip
In the context of the Golden Calf, the women refrained from contributing their finery (edyan) Later, in response to consequences of the sin, the people stripped off their finery [edyam] (Ex. 33:6) as a symbol of mourning. According to the Talmud, these were the crowns that the Israelites had gained with their declaration of faith at Sinai: "We shall do and then we shall hear/understand" [na'aseh venishma] (BT Shabbat 88a). Because the women did not contribute their jewels to the making of the molten calf, they maintained a loyalty to the original experience at Sinai; they never lost those precious crowns as a consequence of participating in idolatry. The jewels of their words bound them. They were thus rewarded with the Rosh Hodesh festival as the ultimate symbol of integrity, despite the vicissitudes of time.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
A comment on my faith and reasoning teaching
I want to point out that nearly everything that I teach in my spiritual direction and my "how to apply faith and reasoning skills" posts uses easy to use concepts taken directly from scripture (from the Bible and also from the Qur'an) and from the two thousand year doctrine of the Catholic Church. In other words, it is mostly concepts that you yourself could deduce; I am not bringing any new information to the table. Far from bringing new doctrine or "revealing secret information," I am trying to improve the discernment of those who work with me so that they can regain the clarity of thought and faith based reasoning that prior pious generations had. Societal and technology changes have hindered rather than helped the average person to actually understand what they are reading when they, for example, read a chapter in the Bible or have a fullness of understanding of the doctrine and its origin of their own faith. It seems like nowadays everyone with a big mouth and media under their control veers on the danger of being a "false prophet." This can be easily identified by noticing that modern false prophets are always claiming to bring new material to the divine books and worse, "decoding secrets" and "channeling the real hidden information." Anyone who is trying to "reveal secrets" or "add prophecy" to the given word of God is by definition a false prophet. So I wanted to point out to you that I do not veer from doctrine, nor do I use techniques that are not fully available to anyone who reads his or her own Bible.
So with that introduction, here is a quick post building on the collection of my teaching about faith and reasoning skills especially for, as always, young readers who are dear to my heart as they seek a revitalization of the faith (and learning) that much of the society of the faithless broken family has shortchanged them. Today I want to mention that when one wants to read the Bible, or study one's faith history and doctrine, there are two opposing forces of extremes that work against your efforts, and you must be aware of them and their motivations. This is not anything sinister, but it is an erroneous and misleading mindset that motivates the producers of material that you might read (or people whom you may interact with).
One extreme is the person who has a faith agenda that they justify through extracted quotations and interpretations from scripture. In its most innocent this is the person who uses several favorite quotes from the Bible as the motivators and leitmotifs of their faith and secular life. We all know people like that and there is nothing wrong with it, though it has the risk of limiting them in their full understanding of God. See, faith, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, was a gift by God that was to be held in unity and community within the faith. Faith was a family and communal trait and responsibility, and it was not a "individual" matter of "conscience." So the mindset of the devout individual that we often encounter today who has up his or her sleeve five or more quotations from the Bible (usually Jesus or Paul) that motivates and fuels their entire faith stance would be unheard of in ancient times and actually considered quite scandalous. So I'm not criticizing the person who truly loves Jesus and who has a few of his sayings to guide them in life, but I am pointing out to you that you must recognize, with charity, that this person often subconsciously uses this device to avoid really exploring the give and take of genuine adult relationship with God within the institutional faith community.
So having said that, there is both the casual and innocent user of this technique but also those who are evangelical, fundamentalist, dispensationalist, and often non-denominational who have a set of Bible quotations that are used as prickly attack devices (which we Catholics feel the most). This is because these types of believers have a genuine love of Jesus, but they also feel they have reduced the entire message of the Bible into a series of "punch lines." This is exactly the opposite of the intention of the Bible and again, this would be unrecognizable to believers of any generation before these last few. Again, it's a free world and they can think what they want, but I want to teach you to recognize that this is a limited and dangerous technique and not to fall for it. By fall for it I mean to be impressed by those who can rattle off quotations to justify their "true" interpretations of the Bible. These types try to make other Christians, especially Catholics, "feel bad and inadequate" when they don't rattle off passages in return. This is faulty thinking at its root. Here is why. The entire Bible is important and valuable in its entirety. No one really knows what God will do in his own time. Here are two examples of how to use discernment.
Look back at yesterday's post about the Luminous Mysteries, where I list each of the 150 psalms of the Book of Psalms by topic. You can see what a diverse and comprehensive list of faith topics is included in the list. It's actually somewhat mind boggling when one looks at it that way, especially when one fully appreciates one person's, David's, authorship of so many of the psalms. Now imagine that you know someone who loves Jesus and thinks that they understand all that is needed of them, based on one, maybe two, sentences of quotation from the entire Book of Psalms. How logical would that be? It makes no sense at all. So you can read the Book of Psalms (as everyone should do) and then imagine meeting someone who has selected two lines from Psalms as not just their favorite passages (which is fine) but the "bottom line" of "all they need to know." Imagine meeting a person who feels that all they need to know from Psalms is "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalms 23:1) and "Thoroughly wash me from my guilt and of my sin cleanse me" (Psalms 51:4). That would be the entire content "of value" that this person takes from the Book of Psalms, passages that emphasize that the Lord will provide all to that individual, and that the Lord will cleanse them of all guilt and sin. Again, these are fine as favorite passages, but can the entire content of King David and others' praise and teaching be reduced to this, out of one hundred and fifty psalms? That is crazy and self justifying thinking! This is why there is a different reading from Psalms each and every day in the Catholic Mass. Psalms cannot be reduced to a couple of "summarized" quotes that "tell you all you need to know." They are a body of knowledge and covenant with God, provided by men who knew God in their personal relationship very, very well, notably King David and King Solomon.
A second example is the use of the measure of a "day" when it applies to God's prophecies. So there are many people who know darn well that when God created the heavens and earth in six days that God was using God's own definition of the length of a "day," (even if they don't admit that God's "day" could be millions of years), but then they claim to be able to decode timing of Apocalyptic events, for example, based on the measure of the human calendar of twenty four hour days. This is an example of this selective quotation "bottom line" reduction of the Bible by those who have agendas of their own preconceived notions. Thus they ignore not only many Biblical events and teachings that demonstrate the challenges of understanding God's timetables, but they ignore contradictions in their own minds. For example, many of these "thinkers" know fully well that the universe, including the earth, was created over a period of billions of years, yet they insist that they can calculate future events of God's based on the use of the "number of days" for these events prophesied in the Bible.
So in conclusion for that one extreme in thinking, recognize, dear friends, that much of it is innocent (people reduce scriptures to favorite sayings that bolster their chosen devout lifestyle), but much of it is a tool of those who, frankly, discard most of the Bible in favor of "interpreting" "punch line events" that are consistent with their hidden or open agendas, and that often leads them into grave error and sin of hubris. Lots of these people write books by the way. So this is why I want to point out to you that there is a difference between citing scripture and reducing the entire book of the Bible into several punch lines, jumping over the body of what God has taught about how humans should have a relationship with him.
Speaking of citing scripture, now I can explain to you the other extreme to guard against, and that is the "Bible history scholar." So on the one hand you have the believer who reduces the Bible to a handful of passages that they feel justifies their stance. On the other hand you have scholars who attempt to "prove" (or "disprove") the Bible. They extract scripture not for its faith meaning but for clues that they can apply to archaeology, historical writings or other corollary "supportive data" to tell you whether "it is probable or not that this or that passage in the Bible is based on any truth or not."
Now obviously I am not criticizing Biblical scholars as a whole! We would not have the body of doctrine and tradition that we do have in the Catholic Church if we did not have two thousand years of Biblical scholars. In a way, you must think of the early collectors of relics as being "faith archaeologists," and be more charitable in your opinion of them than many secular cynics are nowadays in modern times. They understood the value to the faith and to understanding their faith history timing by documenting the martyrs and discovering relics of Jesus (such as the stairs of King Herod's palace, or the True Cross), or of the saints. They may have been wrong and unscientific in many cases, but often they were quite accurate in gaining information from local residents who were descendants of the native people of the time, who could point them in the right directions (for example St. Helen's scouring of the Holy Land for relics and identification of landmarks). And obviously Bible scholars are crucial to understanding documents, such as the Dead Sea scrolls, and to mapping Biblical events to historic times and places. I am all for Bible scholars.
However, there has been a very unattractive modern trend among some "Bible scholars" and this you must use discernment very sharply in order to identify them and understand their error and agenda. There is a modern mindset that ancient people were ignorant and superstitious, and made up stuff right and left because they didn't know better. So these types of "Bible scholars" think that the entire Bible is subject to "proving" or "disproving." They take the principle of the scientific method and misapply it to the Bible in whole pieces. Here are several examples that I can use to help you to understand their mindset. First let's start with an analogy.
Suppose a Bible scholar of this type visited you in your home for coffee. In the course of the evening you bring out your family photograph album and show it to her. You flip through the pages and point out pictures of your great grandparents, your grandparents, parents, your siblings, and you as a child, and you growing up. Photos are taken in various locations, such as your childhood home, on vacations, college campus, and where you married and raised children of your own. You wonder why your visitor looks at you so skeptically, so you ask her what she is thinking. The Bible scholar tells you that because she is a "scientist" she cannot believe anything just based on its "appearances" and what you in your misguided affection (and simple mind) may believe, and hence she cannot authenticate that you did in fact have a family and that those pictures were of real people, and certainly without a DNA test, there is no proof they are actually your relatives, or ever actually existed at all. You might be an egomaniac with Photoshop, she tells you.
That is the problem with this type of "Bible scholar." They ignore that the Bible is not a single book written by someone with an agenda to push, but is instead both a historical and faith document that is fact based and added to in constancy over hundreds of years. They think they look cool and chic by being "skeptical" of everything, and "dig" for the "facts" with a bias toward showing at the very least a "lack of proof of Biblical events" or, they secretly hope, to have the "exclusive" on "disproving" parts (or all) of the Bible. While this is understandable among atheists with empty lives and axes to grind, it actually is very poor "scholarship" and, shockingly, even some "believing Christians" (on campuses no less) fall into this mindset. I'm only being slightly exaggerating and snarky when I say that it bugs them to no end that they have to believe at least that Jews are real and exist because they are still walking and talking in the millions here today! So gosh, they have to at least believe the part of the Bible that "mentions the existence of Israel." Duh! But these extremists literally believe that everything else in the Bible is fair game to be disproved, or at least reduced to "well, this can't be proven so ....." and then they let you feel that it might have been all made up fantasy, like your family photo album doesn't "prove" that you actually had relatives or had been to or lived in the places photographed.
So these are the two extremes of people who you meet either casually as friends or acquaintances, or who you might hear the opinions of in the media, perhaps even purchasing their books in good faith, where you must be cautious. Their techniques and tools, and their arguments seem so reasonable, and easily put you on the defensive. Do not go on the defensive, and use your discernment to recognize the two errors that infest their methodologies. One group errs because they believe in God, but think that his works can be reduced to "bottom lines" and the rest is really moot. The opposite group is biased by disbelief (even if they state otherwise) and a lack of respect for the good intentions of the faithful who lived during or documented subsequently Biblical times. I hope you found this helpful!
So with that introduction, here is a quick post building on the collection of my teaching about faith and reasoning skills especially for, as always, young readers who are dear to my heart as they seek a revitalization of the faith (and learning) that much of the society of the faithless broken family has shortchanged them. Today I want to mention that when one wants to read the Bible, or study one's faith history and doctrine, there are two opposing forces of extremes that work against your efforts, and you must be aware of them and their motivations. This is not anything sinister, but it is an erroneous and misleading mindset that motivates the producers of material that you might read (or people whom you may interact with).
One extreme is the person who has a faith agenda that they justify through extracted quotations and interpretations from scripture. In its most innocent this is the person who uses several favorite quotes from the Bible as the motivators and leitmotifs of their faith and secular life. We all know people like that and there is nothing wrong with it, though it has the risk of limiting them in their full understanding of God. See, faith, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, was a gift by God that was to be held in unity and community within the faith. Faith was a family and communal trait and responsibility, and it was not a "individual" matter of "conscience." So the mindset of the devout individual that we often encounter today who has up his or her sleeve five or more quotations from the Bible (usually Jesus or Paul) that motivates and fuels their entire faith stance would be unheard of in ancient times and actually considered quite scandalous. So I'm not criticizing the person who truly loves Jesus and who has a few of his sayings to guide them in life, but I am pointing out to you that you must recognize, with charity, that this person often subconsciously uses this device to avoid really exploring the give and take of genuine adult relationship with God within the institutional faith community.
So having said that, there is both the casual and innocent user of this technique but also those who are evangelical, fundamentalist, dispensationalist, and often non-denominational who have a set of Bible quotations that are used as prickly attack devices (which we Catholics feel the most). This is because these types of believers have a genuine love of Jesus, but they also feel they have reduced the entire message of the Bible into a series of "punch lines." This is exactly the opposite of the intention of the Bible and again, this would be unrecognizable to believers of any generation before these last few. Again, it's a free world and they can think what they want, but I want to teach you to recognize that this is a limited and dangerous technique and not to fall for it. By fall for it I mean to be impressed by those who can rattle off quotations to justify their "true" interpretations of the Bible. These types try to make other Christians, especially Catholics, "feel bad and inadequate" when they don't rattle off passages in return. This is faulty thinking at its root. Here is why. The entire Bible is important and valuable in its entirety. No one really knows what God will do in his own time. Here are two examples of how to use discernment.
Look back at yesterday's post about the Luminous Mysteries, where I list each of the 150 psalms of the Book of Psalms by topic. You can see what a diverse and comprehensive list of faith topics is included in the list. It's actually somewhat mind boggling when one looks at it that way, especially when one fully appreciates one person's, David's, authorship of so many of the psalms. Now imagine that you know someone who loves Jesus and thinks that they understand all that is needed of them, based on one, maybe two, sentences of quotation from the entire Book of Psalms. How logical would that be? It makes no sense at all. So you can read the Book of Psalms (as everyone should do) and then imagine meeting someone who has selected two lines from Psalms as not just their favorite passages (which is fine) but the "bottom line" of "all they need to know." Imagine meeting a person who feels that all they need to know from Psalms is "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalms 23:1) and "Thoroughly wash me from my guilt and of my sin cleanse me" (Psalms 51:4). That would be the entire content "of value" that this person takes from the Book of Psalms, passages that emphasize that the Lord will provide all to that individual, and that the Lord will cleanse them of all guilt and sin. Again, these are fine as favorite passages, but can the entire content of King David and others' praise and teaching be reduced to this, out of one hundred and fifty psalms? That is crazy and self justifying thinking! This is why there is a different reading from Psalms each and every day in the Catholic Mass. Psalms cannot be reduced to a couple of "summarized" quotes that "tell you all you need to know." They are a body of knowledge and covenant with God, provided by men who knew God in their personal relationship very, very well, notably King David and King Solomon.
A second example is the use of the measure of a "day" when it applies to God's prophecies. So there are many people who know darn well that when God created the heavens and earth in six days that God was using God's own definition of the length of a "day," (even if they don't admit that God's "day" could be millions of years), but then they claim to be able to decode timing of Apocalyptic events, for example, based on the measure of the human calendar of twenty four hour days. This is an example of this selective quotation "bottom line" reduction of the Bible by those who have agendas of their own preconceived notions. Thus they ignore not only many Biblical events and teachings that demonstrate the challenges of understanding God's timetables, but they ignore contradictions in their own minds. For example, many of these "thinkers" know fully well that the universe, including the earth, was created over a period of billions of years, yet they insist that they can calculate future events of God's based on the use of the "number of days" for these events prophesied in the Bible.
So in conclusion for that one extreme in thinking, recognize, dear friends, that much of it is innocent (people reduce scriptures to favorite sayings that bolster their chosen devout lifestyle), but much of it is a tool of those who, frankly, discard most of the Bible in favor of "interpreting" "punch line events" that are consistent with their hidden or open agendas, and that often leads them into grave error and sin of hubris. Lots of these people write books by the way. So this is why I want to point out to you that there is a difference between citing scripture and reducing the entire book of the Bible into several punch lines, jumping over the body of what God has taught about how humans should have a relationship with him.
Speaking of citing scripture, now I can explain to you the other extreme to guard against, and that is the "Bible history scholar." So on the one hand you have the believer who reduces the Bible to a handful of passages that they feel justifies their stance. On the other hand you have scholars who attempt to "prove" (or "disprove") the Bible. They extract scripture not for its faith meaning but for clues that they can apply to archaeology, historical writings or other corollary "supportive data" to tell you whether "it is probable or not that this or that passage in the Bible is based on any truth or not."
Now obviously I am not criticizing Biblical scholars as a whole! We would not have the body of doctrine and tradition that we do have in the Catholic Church if we did not have two thousand years of Biblical scholars. In a way, you must think of the early collectors of relics as being "faith archaeologists," and be more charitable in your opinion of them than many secular cynics are nowadays in modern times. They understood the value to the faith and to understanding their faith history timing by documenting the martyrs and discovering relics of Jesus (such as the stairs of King Herod's palace, or the True Cross), or of the saints. They may have been wrong and unscientific in many cases, but often they were quite accurate in gaining information from local residents who were descendants of the native people of the time, who could point them in the right directions (for example St. Helen's scouring of the Holy Land for relics and identification of landmarks). And obviously Bible scholars are crucial to understanding documents, such as the Dead Sea scrolls, and to mapping Biblical events to historic times and places. I am all for Bible scholars.
However, there has been a very unattractive modern trend among some "Bible scholars" and this you must use discernment very sharply in order to identify them and understand their error and agenda. There is a modern mindset that ancient people were ignorant and superstitious, and made up stuff right and left because they didn't know better. So these types of "Bible scholars" think that the entire Bible is subject to "proving" or "disproving." They take the principle of the scientific method and misapply it to the Bible in whole pieces. Here are several examples that I can use to help you to understand their mindset. First let's start with an analogy.
Suppose a Bible scholar of this type visited you in your home for coffee. In the course of the evening you bring out your family photograph album and show it to her. You flip through the pages and point out pictures of your great grandparents, your grandparents, parents, your siblings, and you as a child, and you growing up. Photos are taken in various locations, such as your childhood home, on vacations, college campus, and where you married and raised children of your own. You wonder why your visitor looks at you so skeptically, so you ask her what she is thinking. The Bible scholar tells you that because she is a "scientist" she cannot believe anything just based on its "appearances" and what you in your misguided affection (and simple mind) may believe, and hence she cannot authenticate that you did in fact have a family and that those pictures were of real people, and certainly without a DNA test, there is no proof they are actually your relatives, or ever actually existed at all. You might be an egomaniac with Photoshop, she tells you.
That is the problem with this type of "Bible scholar." They ignore that the Bible is not a single book written by someone with an agenda to push, but is instead both a historical and faith document that is fact based and added to in constancy over hundreds of years. They think they look cool and chic by being "skeptical" of everything, and "dig" for the "facts" with a bias toward showing at the very least a "lack of proof of Biblical events" or, they secretly hope, to have the "exclusive" on "disproving" parts (or all) of the Bible. While this is understandable among atheists with empty lives and axes to grind, it actually is very poor "scholarship" and, shockingly, even some "believing Christians" (on campuses no less) fall into this mindset. I'm only being slightly exaggerating and snarky when I say that it bugs them to no end that they have to believe at least that Jews are real and exist because they are still walking and talking in the millions here today! So gosh, they have to at least believe the part of the Bible that "mentions the existence of Israel." Duh! But these extremists literally believe that everything else in the Bible is fair game to be disproved, or at least reduced to "well, this can't be proven so ....." and then they let you feel that it might have been all made up fantasy, like your family photo album doesn't "prove" that you actually had relatives or had been to or lived in the places photographed.
So these are the two extremes of people who you meet either casually as friends or acquaintances, or who you might hear the opinions of in the media, perhaps even purchasing their books in good faith, where you must be cautious. Their techniques and tools, and their arguments seem so reasonable, and easily put you on the defensive. Do not go on the defensive, and use your discernment to recognize the two errors that infest their methodologies. One group errs because they believe in God, but think that his works can be reduced to "bottom lines" and the rest is really moot. The opposite group is biased by disbelief (even if they state otherwise) and a lack of respect for the good intentions of the faithful who lived during or documented subsequently Biblical times. I hope you found this helpful!
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Artifacts with Biblical names found
Some people wonder why much of the Bible is "boring" lists of names. Others think the Bible is just made up stories. Both need to realize that archaeology is uncovering genuine proofs of the authenticity of the names and events in the Bible. The most recent event is dramatic illustration of this.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218710405007&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A 2,600 year old clay seal impression, or bulla, bearing the name Gedaliah ben Pashur has recently been uncovered completely intact during archaeological excavations in Jerusalem's ancient City of David, located just below the walls of the Old City near the Dung Gate.
The name appears in the Book of Jeremiah (38:1) together with that of Yehuchal ben Shelemayahu, whose name was found on an identical clay bulla in the same area in 2005. The two men were ministers in the court of King Zedekiah, the last king to rule in Jerusalem before the destruction of the First Temple.
According to Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University who is leading the dig, this is the first time in the annals of Israeli archeology that two clay bullae with two Biblical names that appear in the same verse in the Bible have been unearthed in the same location.
***
Here is what you need to understand in order to truly marvel at these discoveries. First, here is the Biblical verse cited above where the names appear:
Jeremia 38:1-2. Saphatia, son of Mathan, Godolia, son of Phassur, Juchal, son of Selemia, and Phassur, son of Melchia, heard Jeremia speaking these words to all the people: Thus says the Lord: He who remains in this city shall die by sword, or famine, or pestilence; but he who goes out to the Chaldeans shall live; his life shall be spared him as booty and he shall live.
Jeremia was a great prophet of God who guided people in what the Lord wanted them to do during the fall of Jerusalem and the capture of the Israelite populace by the Babylonians.
So what you need to observe is that two of the courtiers who listened to one of the public prophecies of Jeremia, as documented in the Bible, have been proven to exist through the discovery of two clay seals, each bearing a separate name. And these were not common names, and they were both found in the same excavated part of what is believed to be King David's ancient city.
See, this is what I mean when I explain that the Bible can be believed because it is careful "witnessing." The Bible authors were careful to list "boring" names of people who witnessed (personally observed and can attest to the truth of) events. Thus four people are listed as having witnessed Jeremia's prophetic speech to the people (for which he was thrown into a well in a murder attempt) regarding the upcoming capture of the city and the people. And of the four people, their "signatures" (names found on a seals for document purposes) have now been found for two of them. Thus you have evidence that you can hold in your hands that two people who with their own eyes and ears witnessed the prophet Jeremia truly existed.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218710405007&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A 2,600 year old clay seal impression, or bulla, bearing the name Gedaliah ben Pashur has recently been uncovered completely intact during archaeological excavations in Jerusalem's ancient City of David, located just below the walls of the Old City near the Dung Gate.
The name appears in the Book of Jeremiah (38:1) together with that of Yehuchal ben Shelemayahu, whose name was found on an identical clay bulla in the same area in 2005. The two men were ministers in the court of King Zedekiah, the last king to rule in Jerusalem before the destruction of the First Temple.
According to Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University who is leading the dig, this is the first time in the annals of Israeli archeology that two clay bullae with two Biblical names that appear in the same verse in the Bible have been unearthed in the same location.
***
Here is what you need to understand in order to truly marvel at these discoveries. First, here is the Biblical verse cited above where the names appear:
Jeremia 38:1-2. Saphatia, son of Mathan, Godolia, son of Phassur, Juchal, son of Selemia, and Phassur, son of Melchia, heard Jeremia speaking these words to all the people: Thus says the Lord: He who remains in this city shall die by sword, or famine, or pestilence; but he who goes out to the Chaldeans shall live; his life shall be spared him as booty and he shall live.
Jeremia was a great prophet of God who guided people in what the Lord wanted them to do during the fall of Jerusalem and the capture of the Israelite populace by the Babylonians.
So what you need to observe is that two of the courtiers who listened to one of the public prophecies of Jeremia, as documented in the Bible, have been proven to exist through the discovery of two clay seals, each bearing a separate name. And these were not common names, and they were both found in the same excavated part of what is believed to be King David's ancient city.
See, this is what I mean when I explain that the Bible can be believed because it is careful "witnessing." The Bible authors were careful to list "boring" names of people who witnessed (personally observed and can attest to the truth of) events. Thus four people are listed as having witnessed Jeremia's prophetic speech to the people (for which he was thrown into a well in a murder attempt) regarding the upcoming capture of the city and the people. And of the four people, their "signatures" (names found on a seals for document purposes) have now been found for two of them. Thus you have evidence that you can hold in your hands that two people who with their own eyes and ears witnessed the prophet Jeremia truly existed.
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