The three simple steps to God and faith

This is the plainest and simplest way to understand the direct path toward faith in God.

1. Truth: knowledge that he exists

This is supposed to be presented to children at the youngest age, at the same time that they understand who they are, who their parents and other relatives are, and identity of people in general. Children need to be told that God exists, but cannot be seen. When children ask how do we know God exists, explain that many people have seen and spoken with him a long time ago and they left the book (the Bible) that states that he is there and what happened. Children of Islam, the same understanding is given to children about God's existence and the book of the Qur'an. As Christian children grow older they start to understand that God proved his existence in latter years by sending his Son Jesus Christ.

You see, you cannot have faith or reach God if you don't accept that people a lot closer to God than you have testified to his existence and left records of that in the Bible and the Qur'an. If you try to "have faith" or "understand if God exists" you are unlikely to succeed because you are starting with the unspoken assumption that you are smarter or closer to the truth than the authors of the Bible and the Qur'an, and you most certainly are not. This is why you cannot "logic" or "faith" your way to God. You have to first understand that impeccable witness has been given through thousands of years by people who know and saw with their own eyes. No one can duplicate or surpass that; you simply have to accept the facts of the written Word.

2. Love and goodness: You understand that all love and goodness comes ultimately from God, not humans, plants, animals or imaginary beings.

Thus immediately upon accepting the facts, the truth, that God exists, one understands, accepts and embraces that God IS love, that God is all the goodness that ever existed and could ever exist. This is where the child (and those late to finding God) accept the gift of love and give all glory and credit to God for the goodness of creation, the goodness of life, and any blessings. In other words, one understands God's true being, his identity. One can therefore start to develop one's own personal relationship with God. Children start by accompanying their parents in prayer and worship.

3. Consequences of disbelief and sin: You understand that achieving heaven and being with God in eternity is by no means guaranteed, and that sin displeases God mightily and he will react accordingly.

This is something that teenagers, young adults and often extended to middle age adults grapple with but absolutely must not deny or dodge. Children start to learn this from parents and also their worship community, as they recognize right from wrong in general, and what sin is and how it aggrieves God specifically. Sin is understood to be not only an offense against God but also working in opposition and contradiction to what God alone understands is good for each person and for humanity in general. That understanding often comes with age, but no one is guaranteed the time to "find that out in one's own time" so again, children when they reach appropriate ages of understanding must be taught the balance between a loving and forgiving God, but the grave error in taking that for granted and indeed jeopardizing one's relationship with God.

That third stage is the first of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, "Fear of the Lord."

Notice that this foundational gift, which is needed before other gifts can truly be received from the Holy Spirit, is thus the first step in the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, but the third step in having faith in God. Faith in God requires: acceptance of his truth of existence, acceptance of his love and goodness, and knowledge of the consequences of sin and disbelief. When you have that "package" of those three steps, you have faith in God, and you are ready to start receiving the unmerited grace of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the first of which is "Fear of the Lord."

I hope this has been helpful to parents, children, young people, caregivers, preachers, those responsible for faith formation, and those who are patching and repairing their faith journey, which they may have been deprived of in total, or had missteps along the way.

understanding God: where's he & hearing him

I think one of the most frequent faith experiences and challenge that most humans have is wondering where God is? Not in the sense of where he "resides" or "spends his time," but, rather, is he in touch with what is going on with the humans alive on earth? Basically people wonder if God exists, then how much is he involved, if at all, with the day to day details of life. People of great faith wonder this, and people of no faith wonder it too (though they won't admit it because to wonder means to admit God's possible existence, ha, would it not?) So do not feel bad if you have felt this way, whether fleetingly, such as in times of great unhappiness and stress ("Where IS God? Doesn't he care?") or if you have often felt this way (for example, you only "feel God" when you view a landscape of grandeur, such as mountains) or if you have always felt that way (in other words, you are in total spiritual aridity, where you believe but do not feel God and thus you are somewhat like being in a desert, believing that water does exist, but not seeing any or feeling its comfort. No, do not feel bad because this is one of the basic challenges of faith and the human condition.

I must chide you some, though, because to use an analogy such as having an untreated illness, one is not meant to just suffer and let it worsen without an attempt to seek medical help. Faithful and rational believers have also gone through this in the centuries of faith history, and like with an illness, there is no reason to not seek out the advice of those who have had this before you. This is one reason I regret very much that reading the lives of the saints has fallen not only out of our schools (where they were taught along with the Bible), but also out of simple common sense. Centuries of believers have dealt with temporary or life challenging spiritual aridity and its accompanying wondering if God really is at all active in the universe by following the advice, example, and studying the remedies in the lives of the saints before. So while this is a common and frequent human challenge, the fact it's common and well known means that many have met the challenge and dealt with it (isn't logic wonderful?)

First, let me explain why this is not only a common occurrence but also one that worsens during certain phases in human societal development (such as it is). The most fundamental thing to understand is that these doubts and disconnects between the faithful and God are a natural adverse reaction to the problem of limited life span and humanity's obsession with death. In other words, being limited to a life span and having been created to cope with a certain set of circumstances (matter, energy and limited time), the human brain just is not cut out to grasp even the concept of God. Sometimes the more one thinks he or she understands God, the more he or she needs to question how that actually would be possible. The human brain is made up of energy, matter and time (in other words, it processes information and grows, or diminishes, through sequential changes over time). Just the process of thinking is time based, since your brain receives information one moment, processes it, compares it to other information, and then decides on an appropriate response. However, God is not at all comprised of matter, energy OR time, and in fact, he created all of the above, yet resides outside of it.

At some gut level all humans understand that they cannot possibly understand God at all! And so, unconsciously, humans tend to stop trying. Notice I say "unconsciously." Consciously they do the opposite: they cut God down to a size that they can "understand him." They then lose nearly all the opportunity to actually comprehend God's essence, as they trade in difficulty in understanding for understanding something easily, but false, or cartoonish. So the first problem may be summarized as being that humans at a gut level understand that God and human nature are so opposite in substance that unconsciously humans give up too soon in trying to understand God, and thus do not feel him as he does indeed day to day exist in their life and in the world. The second problem is that what people will do is decide to "believe" or "not" a version of God that they feel is not challenging or difficult.

Some decide if they can't "understand" or "hear" him and that if he's so difficult to understand, then he must not exist. Think about how arrogant that is, ha. "If I can't understand God then God must not exist." Hmm. Not Einstein of the Obvious. Good thing I don't feel that way about complex machinery, because if I only used what I understood down to the nuts and bolts, I'd be living outdoors in a sleeping bag I guess. But the first obvious reaction to the instinctive awareness of God and his awesome and immense difference from humans is to refuse, then, to even believe in him. It's like some people feel it is a lost cause to try to understand something that ultimately cannot be understood, and so they abandon all effort and thus belief.

Those who feel the same way but do not abandon in total belief in God thus, then relegate God to a storage place. "God exists but he is not involved in the world" is the usual cop out reasoning. I'm not trying to be mean here, but there is an irony that God cares enough to have dictated a lot of history and printing press ink to faith history and yet, to some people, is deemed to be "a God that is not involved".... ha ha, has anyone given that the logic test? The leap of faith would be as simple as believing that the scriptures (Torah, Bible, Qur'an) are divinely inspired. If they are divinely inspired (meaning guided by God to express his truth), ummmmm, does that not kind of indicate a God who is involved indeed with humanity at some real day to day detail? If an detached and unknowable uninvolved God dictated the events and text of the Torah, Bible and Qur'an, imagine what a busy body God he would be if he was REALLY involved, using that line of thought. That would be the God I described in analogy recently who does not just create the fibers that curtains are made from, and the wind that blows them, but stands outside your house and using his divine hand waves the curtain back and forth.

The middle ground are those people who sincerely believe and who have experienced the transformative power of God in their life, and yet, they often reduce God too, this time to somewhat cartoonish dimensions. The God who is just the one who one asks favors from is an example of God as Santa Claus. The God who is like a big generous hippie who is groovy and does not care what antics people are up to so long as they are "nice" is another cartoon that many supposedly serious believers have. The God who keeps a computer spreadsheet of whether you say the right words about Jesus and good deeds, and then decides you earned enough points for heaven is another cartoon of God, held by some surprisingly serious people. The God who is "on your side" but "against the other guy on your behalf" is another cartoon God. And then there is the spoil sport God who just exists to send trouble your way and pick on you, since you find things difficult and figure that God is maker of a "cold, cruel world" where it is "dog eat dog." That is the cartoon of the cold God who "makes life a vale of tears."

The middle ground is also occupied by people of genuine faith, and a balanced understanding of God who yet, still, have genuine crises and aridity of faith. They are the ones who need faith, pure faith, to partner with reason because they are the ones who feel that tug between believing in God, truly knowing he exists, but that gut level feeling that they can never really know and feel him. Faith is what makes the bridge between what is humanly understandable and accessing some genuine understanding of God and living in communion with him possible. Faith is an active ingredient, a real trait and energy (for lack of a better word), not an inert "giving up that one can't really understand God but 'ought' to."

See, many people feel that "faith" means "ought to." That is why atheists are often wrongly dismissive of the power of faith. Atheists think that "faith" means a person forces themselves to believe and feel something they think "ought to" or "should" be done. But faith is not a vacuum that is bridged through dull duty and enforced belief. Faith is an actual accomplishment based on reality, not a suspension of reality.

Here's an analogy. Think of faith as the bridge over a gap between one's self and God. Those who don't understand faith think of it as ignoring the chasm that exists and just taking "the leap of faith," to use that common expression. But that is wrong because the bridge does exist, but it is built as you walk upon it, one invisible glass brick at a time. So to use the analogy, both faith and reasoning build a brick bridge between you and God. When one uses facts and reasoning, one is able to see the pre-existing red brick bridge and walk on it with confidence. When one uses facts and faith, one is on one's knees, with the gap in front of you, but you feel with your hands and put in place one glass brick at a time, step on it, then place the next glass brick, step on it, further and further, with confidence of faith, as the bricks really are there, but without the confidence of having the pre-built visible red brick bridge in front of you. With faith you are using facts and spiritual insight to create each customized invisible glass brick for yourself, putting it in place, and stepping onto it before putting the next one in place.

How to better understand this with some sympathy for the human condition? Think of the Israelites, freed by God through Moses from Egypt, and into the desert on the Exodus. God actually traveled with them, and was visible to them, most dramatically of course in the Great Theophany when the might of God descended upon the mountain, Mount Sinai. Every man, woman and child saw God's physical presence. Yet, when Moses went up the mountain to meet with God, receiving the Ten Commandments, how long did it take people who actually saw God descend to run off and worship an idol? Days, my friends, days. When Moses did not return right away, these people made the idol bull calf and started their dancing and worshipping of a pagan graven image. Um, where do we begin to explain that? Yes, many scholars point out that the people were genuinely celebrating God's presence and thought they were honoring him with the extra "compliment" of being strong, as symbolized by the bull calf. Right. God had just about shook down and consumed a mountain, and the natural reaction is to think, wow, God's like a really strong calf? Let's dance and worship it?

These were not stupid people, nor were they rudderless and shallow in faith. Human beings have a screw loose in their brains and there is just no polite way to put it. It is, as I said, a natural condition of survival instinct, which is not to cope with or believe in what is not in front of you and hitting you on the head with a hammer all the time. This the problem that God has with humans, to put it succinctly, which is that beings that are created from matter, energy and time cannot understand and have great difficulty motivating themselves, under any circumstance, to understand God, who is unknowable, not being of time, matter or energy.

You then get to the really dippy extreme reaction, which is related to the cartoonish reaction somewhat. Some equate "unknowable God" with "bizarre God." Here's how this, erm, "thinking process" goes:

1. We can't understand God.
2. God's "really out there."
3. Let's imagine really crazy and bizarre stuff that might be "out there."
4. Wow. That crazy and bizarre stuff we imagined must "be God."

That is where you see manufactured sci-fi and fantasy approaches to "faith," plus the obsession with both theoretical aliens and with quantum mechanics and physics (the so called "God particle," but oops, God is not comprised of matter, so no particle is a "God particle," duh.) You also see the distortion of genuine faith traditions, such as Buddhism, into directions that confuse traditional spiritual detachment with a new "what the heck" and thus giving up on a genuine relationship with God. None of these are really pleasing to God, who has gone through a lot with extreme patience and mercy to make himself know to humans, not to be ignored or manufactured with Halloween masks on him.

All of this is a long way to walk you through a few concepts I wanted to introduce you to, starting with the human nature reason that God seems so remote to some people, and why even believers have real crisis or aridity of faith. People need to be kind with themselves and each other and understand that human nature is not tolerant of understanding something that is not matter, energy, time based and, indeed, controllable in ANY way: God. When one is a matter, energy and time based being, one has a serious inability to understand God, and that is a fact. Fortunately, God, the Creator of all, obviously understands everything there is to know or ever know or could be known, and thus God provides ways to make himself known TO humans. God provides the materials for the bridge, God gives humans the map, and God crosses over the bridge to the human side all the time, day by day, second by second, person by person. God is on the same side as humans, since God is of course everywhere. It is one's understanding of God that is on the other side of the bridge. God walks alongside of each human as they cross that bridge to arrive at the other side, which is greater and greater understanding of God.

Think of it this way. When you are wondering if God really exists, and if he cares about the world, and if he is "out there," and whether or not he "cares" about you, he is standing next to you at that moment, where he always has been present! So you are both standing there looking over the gap, while you are thinking you are trying to see if God's there on the other side, and he's standing right next to you already, all along. It is kind of funny in a way and I'm saying that kindly. You think you are gazing into the distance trying to perceive God across the gap, and he's standing right there next to you, and humoring you by looking across the gap with you. But on the serious note, what God is looking at, in the place where you think you are trying to see God, God is looking at where you hope to be, and will be, in your understanding of God. It is your own understanding of God that stands across the gap, not God himself, for he's there already with you.

If there were actually some sort of gap, how, then, can anyone call upon God just by doing so, by speaking or thinking his holy name? "God" is all one has to call, in one's head and heart, and you are in communion with him; he is standing there next to you. Christians who have trouble praying, all they need to do is call upon "Jesus," just his holy name, and they are in communion with him through the authority of God in Jesus Christ.

So, let us think of that analogy of the facts and faith forming one glass brick at a time. You might ask me, what is the first faith brick I can make? That answer is simple. It is the Second Commandment.

"You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain. For the Lord will not leave unpunished him who takes his name in vain" Exodus 20:7.

Here's what you need to understand. This Commandment is a statement of what not to do, but it of course presumes that something exists that could be abused, and that something is the power of just the name of the Lord, God. By power I do not mean magic power. Speaking the holy name of God is the most basic and fundamental first prayer. When one says "God," it is like one is a small child again, saying "daddy" or before one can even speak, tugging on your father's sleeve for his attention. When you say the name "God," you have used the power and holiness of God's name to speak a prayer, seeking his attention, asking him to regard and notice you.

The Israelites, of course, had centuries of knowing that. Thus the Israelites knew the power of the name of God as their first word, the only word, they needed to speak, as it is their call to God's attention. There is nothing magical about God's name as God is holy, not occult. So one is "summoning God" or performing magic with God's name. Likewise there is no magical or symbolic significance to whatever language one is using, and how linguistically God's name is spelled. How do you know that? Because a deaf person who never heard how his language spoke the name God can and does still call upon God by thinking of "God" as his address, just as a baby does not know daddy's full name and how it is spelled or pronounced!

What you need to remember, then, that to call upon God by addressing him by what you understand to be his name is HOLY. It's not the combination of sounds, letters, pronunciations, that make God's name holy; it is the fact that you are calling upon God, addressing him, and the ability to call God, to address the Most High and the Most Holy is a holy act, the most fundamental prayer.

This is why God warns his people, who have known for a long time how to call upon him by his name (the version that they used), not to take his name in vain.

Thus the first transparent, pure clear glass brick based upon fact and faith is that you can call upon God by his name. If you believe or understand nothing else, if you really are on the one side of the gap and see nothing available to you to believe in or understand God, then believe and understand this and therefore make your first glass brick: If you think or speak the name God, you are addressing yourself to him and you have his attention. That is a fact.

See, this is how faith is built based on factual and actionable foundations. It takes very little effort to know and believe, and to understand the logic of this, that when you invoke in your thoughts "God!" you are calling to him and obtaining his attention.

Two more things to explain before I wrap this particular blog post up for now. Regular readers know that I did a series on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. I have added that series under that label on this post so you can easily reference them again, or see them for the first time. What I have just shown you is an example of the gift of Knowledge. I have taught you that through the scriptures (courtesy of the Holy Spirit) that you can call upon the name of God and you have his attention for a fact. That is an example of a piece of the gift of the Holy Spirit, Knowledge, that you now possess, truly. If you start to prayerfully and regularly call upon the name of God, just as comfort, as a statement, as an outreach to him, just to touch him, to reach out to him, by thinking "God" in that mindset, you will also be adding to the gift of Piety.

So you have received 1) the Knowledge of the Holy Spirit that God hears and gives his attention to you whenever you call his name and 2) that you receive the gift of Piety if you cultivate the calling upon God with humility.

My second point is then to think back to the Second Commandment. That is so misunderstood because many people today think that means "don't cuss or swear." That is a misunderstanding that is due to the passage of time where it is part of what is lost in context. People today think it is "sinful" and "disrespectful" to "cuss" or "swear" using God's name, and they think that is what the Second Commandment is about, but they think that because they have lost the context that I just explained, which is that stating the name of God is the first and most fundamental prayer. When you state "God," you are tugging on his sleeve, like a child tugging daddy's sleeve, seeking his attention, and God guarantees that if you state his name you got His attention. Get it now?

God is telling his people through Moses to not call upon him lightly and in vain.

That is what the Second Commandment means, my friends. It presumes that the believer already gets the fact that stating God's name all by itself, in speech or thought, is making the presumption of making one's attention known to God by using his Holy Name to say, "Hey God, connect with me." God has already shown this to all throughout faith history, from Adam to Moses, that he can be called upon just by his Holy Name. And this is why in the time of the giving of the Commandments, God is saying not to mess with his name lightly, calling attention upon one's self in vain. So sure, cussing's not a good idea, but those who think the Second Commandment is about cussing have totally and completely missed the point of what the Second Commandment is talking about, which is the most fundamental and first prayer, which is to state or think His holy name: "God."

When you realize that messing with God by calling upon him in anything but reverence is a bad idea, then you have obtained a piece of the first gift of the Holy Spirit: Fear of the Lord. When you understand that the mention of God's name is the first form of prayer, the most fundamental form, and it is by Covenant (both Old and New) one way that one is guaranteed to have God's attentiveness, you realize that you should be somewhat fearful of doing so lightly. The loss of understanding the holiness (because of its status of God's attentiveness) of simply the name "God" is one of the greatest omissions of strength in modern faith. It's not the cussing or not, it's the forgetfulness that God has given humans his Holy Name the statement of which by itself is a most serious calling upon God for his attentiveness. It is one of the greatest gifts from God, the comfort and assured consolation and attentiveness from him of calling on his name, God, God, God..... yet it's not only forgotten but cartoonishly made into being about cussing. Cussing is a symptom, not the point. The Commandments are the lists of "not to do's," but they come centuries after what God told people TO DO, which is to call upon his name in FAITH.

Think of it this way. God is the person you really want to receive the job of a lifetime from. You have his phone number. Would you call him on the phone and then do a series of crank hang up calls? When you know he has the ultimate caller ID? God's Holy Name is like having his phone number. You use his Holy Name when you want his attention. "God" you say. That is all you need to say or think, and you have God's attention. How dumb do you want to be once you have his attention? This is what the Second Commandment was warning against. I hope that the inevitable telephone modern analogy helps :-)

God's Holy Name is often the only thing that a person paralyzed by fear, by doubt, by affliction, by persecution, by death's door, by unsolvable human problems can state in appeal. Faith history in the scriptures shows the bond of the simple stating of names, God's and his servant's. If you have aridity in faith, or moments you don't feel God, or long periods where you doubt he is even involved with humans, then you have simply forgotten this, or never were taught it, that all appeals and all communion with God begin with his Holy Name, just stating "God."

Every path and every road to knowing "where" God is and "hearing" God in reply starts with understanding anew or remembering and regaining from old the initial brick of fact and faith which is to call upon God for his attention and comfort, just for the communion of togetherness, simply by stating his name.

Another way to understand why God's name is Holy is to understand that one's name is not magical, but it is a statement of purpose. You see this in Isaiah 49:1-3:

Hear me, O coastlands, listen, O distant peoples. The Lord called me from birth, from my mother's womb he gave me my name. He made of me a sharp-edged sword and concealed me in the shadow of his arm. He made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me. You are my servant, he said to me, Israel, through whom I show my glory.

Notice three names referenced. First of all, Isaiah reports that "The Lord" called him from birth. Do you notice that the scriptures never go for extended times just referring to God as "He?" Those who wrote the Books of the Bible carefully use God's name, God, or The Lord, over and over. This is because they are referring to God by his Holy Name, which is also his office. God is The Divinity, that is what God "does." God's "occupation" is to be Holy and Perfect. God is a Holy Name because it is the Office indicator of the one who is All Holy. God is thus the one word statement of perfection and holy authority. Scripture writers therefore did not save ink by saying "He said this and then he said that to me, and he created the world and he did these deeds." Rather, they repeat over and over the name of "God" or the "Lord" because each use of God's name is like a sealing of that statement's Holy Authority. Thus Isaiah says "The Lord" called him from birth even though he just referred to God as "the Lord" in the sentence before. We'd know he meant God if he said "He," but that would be an incredible thought to the people of God who understood the frequent use of God's name as Holy and as sealing the statement with his Holy Authority.

The second example is that Isaiah states that The Lord gave Isaiah his own name from Isaiah's mother's womb. What does that mean? It does not mean that God instructed Isaiah's mother to call her child Isaiah. What Isaiah meant is that God gave to Isaiah his particular calling, his service and office to God as prophet, from the womb. This is a way for you today to understand why names were important: not for magical reasons, or numerology, or good luck, or symbolic "meanings," but because they are in imitation of God, whose Holy Name is his Holy Office. It is not that Isaiah was named I-S-A-I-A-H, but that he would be "that" Isaiah, that one called by God to that office of prophet. That is why the name Joseph has great meaning, for example, even when it was the most popular name for boys and millions upon millions had that name. It is not the spelling and the lettering and the language and the prounciation, it is the linkage of name-to-person, and then the service to God, from whom all names must be subordinate.

Then Isaiah mentions a third name, taking it upon himself, the people of Israel. Isaiah is through name now almost the agent or broker for Israel as a whole with God. God is addressing the entire nation of Israel by name through Isaiah. God said to Isaiah, "You are my servant," but instead of saying ", Isaiah," God said, "Israel, through whom I show my glory." Isaiah thus has his office of linking God to Israel, and Israel has its office of being the vessel through which God shows his glory.

I'm trying to simplify for you the whole understanding of why names are reverential and indeed holy. It is not the spelling because Isaiah would be just as holy a prophet as if he were called Fred or Abdul. But giving a human a name (or giving animals names, as Adam did in Genesis) is an imitation of God's Holy Authority and Office that is expressed in his name alone. God is the only one who has always existed and always will, and he of course knows himself by the name of his own choosing. Understand, then, that the practice of giving people names is an imitation of that which cannot be duplicated. Only God can be God. Many people can be named Isaiah. But only one Isaiah was the one chosen by God for that office. That is why a person's name is considered holy and of power, but not because of any magic or secular empowerment inherent in the lettering, language or sounds. Rather, all names are in imitation of God's first and only example, of him being not only named God but The One God. God taught naming to Adam and that is why naming should be equally reverential among humans, understanding where the meaning of naming derived, directly from God's hands.

I went into some detail here but that has been on my mind to get rid of that superstitious and often ridiculous modern view of naming (the nuttier the better), which is not, now that you understand this, as harmless as many think. When humans become idiotic with their own naming it only distances themselves more from understanding faith and the role of God's name and the dignity of humanity's imitation of God's role modeling. Further, naming has not just become silly but it also has promoted erroneous occult beliefs as people forget what scriptures mean when they emphasize the power of names. Scripture does not mean that names are manufactured and manipulated sources of power at all. Scripture means what it has always mean but people no longer understand, which is that humans name in imitation of God, whose Holy Name is also his Holy Office. When you speak God's name you call upon him as God. You do that no matter what the theoretical spelling of God's name in a human language might be. Only Moses ever heard God's name spoken by him anyway (except Jesus of course). No, when the scripture comments about the importance of human names the authors are doing so in the context of a time when millions shared the same names and simple traditional ones they were: the power is not in the name but in the understanding of what a person's name represents as a small fragment of the example of dignity that God himself has made available to humanity in imitation of Him.

I hope that you have found this helpful!

(Hi young people!...)

Simple logic about God & human scandal/sin

I'm not sure why everyone misses the point so much these days. I guess it is the increasingly egocentric (and even ego maniacal) focus of even the average person these days. So here is a simple observation to keep in mind.

The more that crime, scandal, sin and bad behavior are exposed in each and every religious organization:

the more it simply proves that humans are broken and imperfect individuals who need awareness and belief in God more than ever.

Have you noticed the lack of logic so many have? Whenever there is a scandal in a church, mosque, synagogue or any other place of faith, the more people say "Ah ha, this is why I question that there is a God."

Yet when the same scandals appear in secular settings (home, places of business) they are called "crimes" or "unethical behavior." Hmm.

So a parent who uses their child in porn, for example, is "sick," "unethical" and "a criminal," while if a religious community member does it, it's somehow "justification" to ''doubt God."

Um, news flash. People have been weak, broken and corrupt since the Garden of Eden. Duh. All humans are unworthy by nature. However, being created in the image of God they have the opportunity to find God and become, again, his child. Whether a person sins/commits crime/is unethical within a religious community or outside a religious community, all it demonstrates is how very far humans remain from God. People need to recognize God and allow him to guide and lead one's life, not jump on falls by religious people or institutions (which will always occur and I promise you, even if you replaced flawed humans with perfect robots, robots will break down and run amok too).

So yes, investigate scandals and hold the faithful accountable for their hypocrisy, but beware, because as you do so, you are excusing the same behavior in those with little or no faith. And you are missing the entire point, which is made clear in the Gospel, which is that humans need to be CONSTANTLY REPENTING AND SEEKING FORGIVENESS OF THEIR ONGOING AND CONTINUAL SINS UNTIL THE MOMENT OF EACH PERSON'S DEATH.

The only perfect person lived two thousand years ago. Everyone else needs continual grace and forgiveness every moment of their life, believer or not, in secular setting or religious.

Why immediate obedience to God necessary

This is especially directed toward young people, those under thirties and most especially young teens (hi there!) because, frankly, I've about given up on your parents' and teachers' generations of understanding these things. They are so infested with "magical" thinking instead of 1) faith and 2) logic and reasoning based on facts. You've been raised that way too, but I have a great hope that you recognize something is very wrong: totally wrong. So this is part of the "faith and reasoning" series where I teach you how to have logical faith based on the truth, accomplished through reasoning and the facts, and also develop your skills in using classic logic to solve problems and form opinions.

Here I am going to first give you an analogy that you can all relate to, and then we will use logic to analyze the analogy.

Suppose that a society, such as the United States, recognizes all at once that cigarette smoking is dangerous for one's health and causes cancer. (I'm not doing a smoking bash here or making an extreme medical statement; I just want to use a genuine topic based on facts for the analogy). So let's suppose that everyone realizes all at once that smoking causes specifically lung cancer and that it is certain to happen for each person eventually. You will have, based on human nature, reactions that divide the population into roughly thirds. One third will quit immediately. One third will want to quit but being pretty heavy smokers or with a big addiction, they have to use various methods to quit, but they have perfect intention to do so as SOON as they can. But then we come to the other third. That third will plan to quit "someday" and use "magical thinking" to manipulate the situation, thinking that they "know better" than the doctors. So that third group will "plan" to quit someday but will continue to smoke and, actually, will work on the members of the first two groups to get them to continue to smoke along with them.

This third group gives this reaction, this very bad reaction, for a combination of reasons, but they all come down to 1) lack of faith and 2) arrogance and self pride overcoming logic. The lack of faith is simple in that they just do not believe either the dire warnings of the doctors or the evidence of their own eyes, which is lots of people getting lung cancer and dropping dead of it, including in their own families. They just refuse to believe and have lack of faith in either the policy or the facts because of reason number two, their arrogance and self pride. That arrogance and pride gets its strength from "magical" thinking. Here are examples of magical thinking:

1. I can keep on smoking longer than anyone else without getting the lung cancer because I'm physically and spiritually better than anyone else.
2. Because I know better than everyone else I can tempt people to also keep smoking, which they enjoy after all, longer, and not have to give up something they enjoy too! So I'm putting to rest their "false fears."
3. Besides, it's not fun being part of a rapidly dwindling group of smokers. I want company and to heck with the consequences, so long as I am partying out and smoking with lots of friends. Hey they know the risk so if they listen to me keep smoking and get cancer, it's their fault ("destiny") anyway.
4. I want to keep doing this wrong and dangerous thing and to rationalize it and keep having a good time with lots of smoking friends, I will tell them they were "born to die of cancer" or that it is "their destiny" if something happens and they get sick. I will make it sound like "the force is with them" or they have "karma" or they will have a better "future life" to make up for their current life being cut short by doing this dangerous smoking.
5. I'm an addict and a weakling and can't quit. But I'm too proud to ask for help, especially because I mocked the very people who did this health study and made the discovery of the danger. So instead of doing what I know I should do and ask for help, I'm too proud and self superior so I'll not ask for help, keep on doing so, and, in fact, sabotage any smoker quitting service I can, since that way I can tell myself that even if I was not proud, none of the smoker quitting services exist or really work anyway.
6. I'm neurotic, obsessive compulsive, depressed, anxious and/or paranoid. I think everyone is pretending that smoking is dangerous and pretending to get sick and die. I also think they are pretending that dead is really dead.
7. I'm all or some of the above in 6 and I think, since I can't think properly, that if people stop smoking and dying of lung cancer that "something worse will happen." Maybe the world is resting on the back of giant turtles who like to breathe cigarette smoke and if we all stop smoking the turtles will get mad and drop the earth and it will break.

I wish I was joking but I am not. I personally, and through second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth degrees of "Kevin Bacon" know people that believe all of the above: a LOT of them. They believe it not only in the actual analogy that I give, but worst of all, they believe it when you apply this analogy about acknowledging the reality of the one true God and of obeying him. They "postpone" or refuse in total to believe in God and to immediately obey him for all those reasons I have listed above.

So we have used logic to list the reactions and reasons of the three groups of people in the smoking analogy. And we have used logic to recognize that just as the analogy cites doctors who document the facts that, in the pretend USA example, that every smoker will get lung cancer and die, this analogy can now be applied to belief in God. God is the doctor who explains that if one smokes that each and every person who smokes will get lung cancer and die. Thus to transfer the work we did on the pretend case study to actuality, God is like the doctor who warns what will one hundred percent will happen, disbelief in God and sins are like the smoking of cigarettes (the thing that is dangerous and wrong to do even if it is "fun"), and hell (not being saved and not having eternal life) is like the inevitable lung cancer in our pretend analogy.

Do you see how powerful logic based on facts can be? Now you can use the logic you developed in the pretend analogy to understand why so many people deny God or worse, even when they understand the risk and reality (the consequences of "cancer") they PUT OFF obeying what they can see and suspect is true and worse, hold their friends, family and society itself back from being believers and immediate obeying of God. You can work down the list of seven I gave to you above and now substitute disbelief/sin/disobeying of God for wherever we list the action of smoking. We can list not being saved, being punished by God in this world, going to hell, and hurting other people by being unjust and/or sinning or spreading unbelief as the substitute for the getting and dying of lung cancer.

Let's work through one example, the first one. The smokers in the first example of pride think they can resist the consequences of smoking longer than anyone so they keep smoking and figure they will quit at the last possible moment. Thus they figure because they are physically and spiritually "better" than anyone else, they can keep smoking until just "before" they actually "get" cancer and then quit in the nick of time. That's the "logic" of pride in the first reasons to keep smoking example.

Now here is how it translates. Yeah, OK, maybe there is a God and maybe he will punish us if we sin. But because I am physically and spiritually "stronger" than anyone else, I will keep doing what I feel like, including sin, because I figure due to my superiority and my good deeds that if I figure out there really is a God, I will by lying around on my death bed after a really fun life and can quickly convert and be forgiven. I know that God will give me a really cool life, including with postponing obedience to him, because he made me so physically strong, good looking, popular, smart and spiritually so "complete" and "evolved" that I can control when I "flip" to believe in God, if he convinces me AND still have postponed obeying him until the last minute.

Here's the problems with this thinking. *sigh* I can't believe I even have to explain this but here goes. If one is disbelieving and disobeying God, no matter what "good deeds" you are doing, you are still 1) sinning 2) encouraging by your life other people to sin and 3) refusing to give God what is due to him on the spot NOW and FOREVER, throughout your life. The people in this category think they are so "blessed" that they can decide if or when to totally surrender to God. They imagine that they are just so wonderful that they can keep making this "personal" decision and that it's theirs to make AND that they will have ample time to "make the switch" if they must. But what happens? Let's go back to our analogy.

1. They keep smoking and get the cancer much faster than anyone else. Hmm.
2. They keep smoking and make money off of it by keeping others smoking through their business and/or their example. Thus their postponed obedience costs other people their lives.
3. They get in a crash and die before they can "make the switch." Ooops.
4. They don't realize that by the time they think they can "make the switch" that they already have the deadly cancer growing undetected. So they stop smoking and then find they have the cancer already because they "postponed" too long.

You can logic through, then, how this maps to disbelieving/postponing obeying God.

1. They disbelieve or postpone obedience and their sin or behaviors kill them even quicker. They go to hell.
2. They know what they are doing is wrong but they make money off of it or at worse by continuing to do so their children do the same neglect of God and thus they make money and tempt others by neglecting God, piling up a lot of unforgiven and some unforgivable sins. They go to hell AND they bring others with them through their delays in obedience.
3. Life happens and they get in a wreck and die or something else happens before they can repent. They go to hell.
4. They wait so long that their hearts are so hardened that even when they "decide" to "make the switch" they just can't do it, because they can't be humble, tender and flexible enough to finally do what they so called "planned" to do all along. So when they are ready to "switch" they find they can't at all, or they do it half hearted, and with a cold heart, like God is a formula to now apply. They go to hell.

I'll leave this with you to work through mapping in your own minds the other "reasons" for disbelief/postponing obeying God, listed 2 through 7, matching the smoking/lung cancer analogy and "reasons" with what that means for disbelieving/postponing obeying God. Pay special attention to the lack of one person converting in their heart to God as a bad example that then leads others back down that path to ruin. This is the heart of why God's judgment is especially stern to those who aren't really making an "individual life style choice," but are actually leading others the same way, often deliberately, as in reasons number 5, 6 and 7 but really all of them, as they want to "party on" with what they are doing, and that requires undermining those who might otherwise have repented and followed God.

*sigh*

Young people, you've been sold a bill of goods (an expression for being stiffed) by the previous generation. Previous generation, wise up.

Gaining wisdom

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. (This and other citations regarding fear of God are in the Bible: see my previous posts on these topics via the labels.)


Fear of the Lord is appropriate and just for two reasons. First is that one should fear (as opposed to be "scared" of) God because only then does one have the proper perspective regarding humanity and all their many flaws and God's mercy and love, and ultimately, his perfect judgment. People must fear losing God, fear losing his love, and fear bringing down upon one's self the consequences of sin and disobedience.

Second, Fear of the Lord is the antidote to human pride. Human pride is toxic in both secular and spiritual matters, and it leads to numerous errors, evils, lack of justice, sin and ultimately eternal chastisement. When one genuinely fears God one is taking the best medicine against the deadly human ailment of pride.

Understanding prayer via faith and reasoning

In the news one reads that people ask for prayers in time of hardship, for themselves and for others, such as loved ones. Some if not many of those requests are sincere and justified. Some are sincere but not justified, and others are insincere. The great worry is who exactly are they recommending praying to? Here is where I want to use an analogy to help you to better discern what is really going on and to understand genuine, effective prayer.

Genuine, effective, justified prayer is directed to God alone. Now, some of you may ask, wait a minute, what about traditional cultural prayers that are directed to presumed divine entities other than God? Remember, as I have always stated, I am not critiquing traditional faiths that are not monotheistic. However, many, if not most, modern people, particularly those who have access to the media, are hypocrites who try to artificially cement together some sort of New Age "belief" where they believe in God when it is convenient, but they subordinate God's reality and primacy to pieces of crazy quilt chunks of "other faiths," resulting in pure idolatry that they punctuate with supposed belief in God. In essence while they state God on occasion with their mouths, they venerate the works and beliefs of their own hands and thus are idolaters. This is particularly true of those who claim (in Star Wars kind of voices) that the "force" is with them. That is a thinly disguised idolatry where they feel they can manipulate power that is "available" to them. So I thought of this analogy to help you, especially young people, who have been raised on a diet of believing in theoretical cartoon super heroes but not the real God.

When one prays to God, one can put in front of God your wishes for resolution of a matter, but you realize that God may or may not respond to your hopes as you may wish. So in this sincere and justified prayer, you know that God is in control, and that he will do what he will, and that even disappointing results will yield at some point that you cannot see good fruit and grace. Grace is given to those who pray in this way, with a sincere heart, to God, not as a "reward" for obeying, but because that IS the way it "works."

When one prays to some sort of "forces" in the "universe," and worse, actually perform deeds and works to try to invoke the powers of those forces, one is, of course, treading on the ground of witchcraft, sorcery, idolatry, fraud, self deception and danger. Here is the analogy to help you. Most defenders of such beliefs use the expression that they are "tapping into" this or that "force" or "gift." The English language idiom "tapping into" means to insert a device by which one can siphon off a flowing product. Thus people who harvest tree sap for making syrup "tap into" the tree. People who steal TV cable service "tap into" the legitimate cable with their own connection leading to their own TV. People who listen in on phone conversations "tap into" the telecommunications signal. New Age believers and other idolaters most closely envision themselves "tapping into" electricity, just like plugging an appliance into the electrical wall outlet.

So here are the two problems with that imagery. One is the obvious that they are all "tapping into" not divine "universal" forces but simply strongly concentrated manmade or otherwise created "forces," and by no means are they tapping into anything divine or of God, not even his smallest fingernail's worth. When one plugs an electric fan into the wall, one is using a manmade plug to insert into a manmade socket in a manmade wall to access manmade wiring that carries man generated electricity (that you receive manmade bills for and pay with manmade money) all generated by a manmade power plant. So their understanding of how the universe is bogus from the get go because they are mixing apples and oranges in their own verbiage and understanding. The "forces" of the "universe" are not "just like" "tapping into" "something." When one prays to "forces" and attempts to invoke them through works, deeds and thoughts, you are, by definition, working only with manmade devices. You are not surrendering to God your problems, your hopes, and your faith, and "allowing" God to respond as he will. You are simply juggling, fruitlessly, manmade concepts, devices and efforts.

So that is the faith part of the faith and reasoning balance. Faith is understanding and believing that there is God alone, God who is in control and who will respond, even if you cannot see, cannot fully believe yet, and cannot comprehend his reasoning. As the man said to Jesus, "Lord I believe, help my unbelief." Faith is being at that starting point of genuine belief, even though one needs assistance, from God himself, and from others in the genuine faith community (which is why the pathway of the genuine saints is often studied by those seeking to develop and strengthen their own faith). "Tapping into forces" is not faith. It is idolatry, which is to attempt to give godly powers to devices and imaginings of one's own making. There is an entire industry and self delusion about "tapping into" "one's own" "inner" whatevers, including presuming one has one's own "godliness." I think not, and I have yet to meet a single person alive today who has had a genuine godly thought in him or her. Godliness comes only from God himself, I mean, duh. "Tapping into" forces or one's self leads away from God, not toward him.

Therefore, let's give the person who is "tapping into universal forces" some credit in this next part of the analogy. Let us suppose he or she (I use expressions like 'manmade' for brevity and also for ease of reading by those who do not have English as their first language) responds to my criticism of the plugging an appliance into the manmade electrical power generator and he or she says, "Fair enough, what you say is accurate. But what do you say if I change my thinking so that I'm not tapping into a manmade electrical outlet, but tell you that my imagery is tapping into the power of natural electrical forces in the universe, such as lightning, or the electric field of the planets, etc." You see, there is the problem. Even a sincere minded person such as this imaginary dialog partner continues to try to "tap into" something that is mindless. Do you really want to try to wield supposed power from a lightning bolt? Or imagine that you are gathering in your hands the electrical force field that is in theory emitted from Pluto or whatever? First of all, this person is assuming that like maple syrup that such fields truly exist and they exist in a divisible and usable way. How does a person using reasoning and logic respond to this preposition? Reply, "OK, all powerful one, hand me some gravity. Just break off a piece for me to carry around and use."

Quickly the logical person perceives that no power in the universe can be "tapped" or "utilized" without a manmade device. The only way someone can "hand you some gravity" is to build devices that allow you to experience forces of gravity, or punch you in the face and abuse you until your battered body hits the floor due to gravity. Neither is very godly. You see, using logic and reasoning you are able to not get swept away in a bogus analogy but say, "Well, hang on, how exactly would that work?" And you remember that the "forces" in the universe are emitted due to natural activities, and any "tapping" of them is not divine, but good old machinery if done in reality, and good old idolatry if done in one's mind.

Again, giving the person credit for being sincere, although totally lacking in genuine faith and understanding, imagine that he or she says, "Well, alright then. You've got me there. But that does not explain ESP." (What self puffed up people call being "psychic" nowadays). Erm, um, sorry, but oh yes it does. What do you "tap" into your supposed ESP or "psychic" power with? A human brain. And we all know the human brain is far from all powerful or divine. I mean, you can't even explain migraines but you think that because some ESP power is a reality that this is somehow evidence that you wield divine ability or "tap into" "universal forces?" I think not. Again, just like tapping the maple tree to get the sap to make the syrup, the human body and all of its parts are a created thing, not divine. Those of you who have been reading my God the All Knowing series understand how a human brain (no matter how presumably "smart" the person is) cannot be compared to God's All Knowing. See, a person cannot "tap into God consciousness" because the human brain is limited by not only its obvious size and other flaws but its structure as, like the tree, a created object. God exists outside of time, outside of matter, and outside of energy (aka "forces") and thus cannot be understood nor can he be "accessed" by any created object, such as a brain in a body, since those are totally in the world of matter, energy and time.

Just to go a little further with this, again, anticipating what the person might respond to this, consider angels, genuine angels. They were created by God and abide in his realm, where there is no matter, energy or time. That is why they are able to receive and share in God's beatific vision. But just suppose for argument's sake, in order to help you to understand this crucial point, for some reason, to show this to you, God took an angel from heaven and put him into a human body on earth. That angel would no longer be able to receive or share in God's inner being since the angel is now within "incompatible with God hardware," to use a computer term. Any created object, particularly the human body, is incompatible with "tapping into" God. Totally. Those of you who are geeks and wonks can probably best appreciate this understanding. God is outside of time, matter and energy, and humans would be an input/output device that is entirely bound by time, matter and energy. Angels are entirely outside of human and universe constraint in that they are created, but they are created by God outside of time, energy and matter.

So no, not even genuine powers of ESP demonstrates any "tapping into" of supposed "universal forces," since it is simply an evolved trait of animals too, akin to what we call animal instinct. It's a survival trait and what is a survival trait? An ability that helps a biological being (created not divine) to survive (its matter and energy continues to exist for a period of time). Voila!

The scales certainly should be falling from some eyes now. It is so abundantly clear that prayer is directed toward God and God alone, and can not and should not be confused with even impressive attempts, all of which are manmade or man controlled, to "tap into" natural energy in the universe (energy being created by God but not of God or angels at all) or to vaunt their own biological survival traits, such as ESP, which again are survival traits because they assist in achieving a measure of time (time) of life (matter and energy), again which is totally not of God. Created by God, yes, "of God," no. Prayer is the only I/O "device" that bridges the totally incompatible hardware of humans (time, matter, energy) and God (eternity, always being, no matter or energy, those being only some of his creations but not what he "dwells" within.) And prayer only "works" because you are not attempting to manage God's reply, his "output."

I hope you have found this to be helpful.

The illness of "complicated grief"

Just read a NYT article about it, as it's being considered for inclusion as a defined mental disorder in the DSM. OK, need to get on with some things but quickly, here is a case study to think about, especially young people.

Complicated grief: prolonged grieving after a loss (death in the family) that robs the survivor of their ability to live or their genuine participation in life.

How to cure? First, you need to understand the challenge, about why it is such a real phenomenon, in the human biological, cultural and spiritual (Biblical) context.

Remember what I have explained that romantic love, per se, and the modern parent-child bond is a fraction of what it used to be. Let me explain. When humans lived hand to mouth in subsistance existence, every member of the family had to work for the daily food AND the only way families prospered was to build families with many children. So humans are biologically and spiritually programmed to want to be in stable marriages with lots of kids. Just because much of western society is now prosperous, this does not mean that all those thousands of years of biological and spiritual adaptation now changes.

Bible reference: Reread the short but very powerful passage where Jesus encounters a funeral procession, where a widow has lost her only son. I explained in previous blogs that this could well have meant death for the widow, as only a husband or a son could provide for her. This is one reason Jesus felt such pity for her and promptly raised her son from the dead and restored him to his mother.

Large families and obligations to feed many children are not the "burden" that modern free spirited people seem to think they are: they are a safety need, against too much grief, too much morbidity, too much dead end. Generations of women have emotionally survived the dead of a child, or a spouse, because one had to "keep going" for the rest of the family, and this indeed would bring them out of their deepest grief, even if nothing could of course ultimately heal it. The problem is that a person with complicated grief is not the sick person: the society that no longer has the entended support AND obligations that provide this safety net is the entity who is sick.

So I resist the idea that complicated grief is a person's individual burden; it is the result of society no longer supporting, as it did before, the large stable family AND the necessity of "keeping on or we all suffer" mentality, as both of those heal complicated grief. This is why the modern somewhat manufactured thought of giving the griever "a new purpose in life" (usually through a job or more education) has some merit, but it's a shadow of what actual real life in less prosperous but more populated/per family times offered, not a "new purpose" but continuity in the need to go on. Most families DID suffer the loss of a baby or child in the old days. That's one reason why previous generations did not have "complicated grief," they had reality, which is many families had four or more children, and often one was stillborn, died in infancy or during childbirth, or of illness or poverty at a young age. One suffers less when one is part of what is the normal life experience and with many in the family who are indeed still alive and who need you.

The second thing to think about is that in un-believing, weak faith, or totally God-less times, it is very hard for complicated grief people to move on if they do not at some point embrace with joy, not with sorrow, that their child is with God in heaven and would not come back even if he or she could. Faith is not a sugar pill: it is reality. People with complicated grief have often been robbed by society or in their individual upbringing of not only really believing in heaven, God and their child being their (or their spouse or loved one having hope of being there), but even those who do still believe have a lukewarm perception of the joy and bliss their loved one has in the eternal presence. You must understand that heaven is mind blowing beyond what anyone can imagine. Generations of grieving parents or spouses before were not making lame excuses when they comforted saying "He (or she) is in a better place." The old time believers understood that it is really, really, really, REALLY true. Understanding that reality is the ultimate survivor guilt and other symptom reliever. Again, it is not a sugar pill. It is acknowledgment that heaven, guaranteed for children, hoped for by believing adults, and even those who can only rely on God's mercy as they had rejected him in life, is a place that is so amazing and eternal that no one would want to come back regardless of how much they loved a person who is not there with them at that time.

So complicated grief is another illness of not the individual (though they are suffering the very real pain and symptoms.) It is the illness of society's destruction of large families and of mainstream genuine faith in the reality of God in each person's life and after life in eternity. It's like society has the illness but the complicated grief person is suffering all the symptoms.

I hope you have found this helpful.

Book excerpt to help understand human nature

The more prosperous people become and the more society controls all of their sources of information, the more people become both inhumane and un-human. Basically, in the past several decades people have done more to lose their basic humanity and humane-ness than at any point in their history. Worse, the past several decades were a total reversal of the trend line, which had been toward increased humanity and self awareness. This ought to be terrifying to anyone who gives a damn at all.

It's a bit of a paradox, the problem of increased prosperity. By prosperity I do not necessarily mean being middle class or rich, but I mean that life is, by definition, no longer a daily struggle just to survive and to subsist. I'm not making this up (this is what you used to learn in history classes, dear young people ;-) Human life can be characterized as "subsistence," which is defined as barely making the necessary gatherings of food, water, shelter and fuel in order to survive and to, hopefully, support one's family, or as "prosperous," which means that you have excess or surplus than what you and your family need to just survive. I write about this somewhat in my understanding capitalism series. So the corn farmer who grows just enough to feed and shelter himself and his family is "subsistence," while the corn farmer who grows extra to sell in the market for optional or "betterment" activities is a basic capitalist and "prosperous," comparatively speaking.

Here is the paradox, and it is obvious to any student of human nature and also any student of the Bible. The subsistence man, woman or child is not allowed much delusion about the nature of human beings. Subsistence is the ultimate "reality show." The subsistence person is hypersensitive, in a good way, to reality. They can look at the crop seeds in their hand, look at the land, watch the weather, and have a very good idea how reality will turn out... will they grow enough and in time to survive, or face privation.

A person with surplus, with that extra produce or production, allowing them relative "prosperity" is able to imagine more, and is thus instantly more vulnerable to becoming increasingly detached from reality. Just to cut to the chase, a person who is prosperous has too much time on his or her hands to guarantee continued contact with reality, because now they can imagine that they are someone they are not, that life "works" in ways that is different than it really does, that they can make dog doodoo up in their minds and writing it down call it fiction, and mislead others, and become self-congratulatory at their own "success" while others suffer (and then imagine bogus reasons for doing so).

So why have humans become, until recently, increasingly humane and understanding their own humanity, even as they became prosperous? Because, until recently, they held tightly to their ultimate reality, as revealed in the Torah, the Bible and the Qur'an. In those books centuries of believers recorded the faith history as they interacted with the one true God. When one studies the true Word of God, who made not only humans, but all that exists in the universe and "beyond," one has an accurate view of humanity's reality, hopes, dreams, aspirations, and also the many pitfalls of their imperfection and brokenness. So until the past several decades as the Gospel and the Qur'an spread, many more people had the benefit of hoping for increased prosperity while at the same time remaining firmly rooted in reality. With the rise of so called "New Age" "beliefs, the usual cyclical interest in Satan and "witchcraft," the heavy use of mind altering substances coupled with defiant attitude toward even beneficial authority, "for pay" "religion" and "salvation," the rise of atheism and vampire "chic,"and the incredibly arrogant belief of "caste" systems, for lack of a better word, of the "enlightened" and the "not so spiritual," many people (and I know that most of the world "decision makers") have totally lost touch with reality, and have led many millions behind them into that ultimate dead end.

With this concern in mind I read a passage in a book written by our current Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, written when he was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. The book, "The Spirit of the Liturgy," is about the format and spiritual rationale for the format of worship of God in the Catholic Church known as the Mass. In this book the former Cardinal Ratzinger helps the reader to understand the spirit of the Mass, and thus its history and foundation. Here is the excerpt, where PB16 is analyzing why the Chosen People, the Israelites who have just escaped slavery in Egypt, through Moses and God's personal intervention, could seem to hardly be able to wait to "cheat on God" (my wording) and be unfaithful to God even as God is meeting with Moses to give to him guidance and the Law. I've written about this before, to help my readers to better understand scripture. But here I was impressed at how I can share this excerpt with you to better understand the danger of human nature that I have just described above, and that is now causing the ruination of all that is good and genuinely authentic about humans and humanity.

In the Old Testament there is a series of very impressive testimonies to the truth that the liturgy is not a matter of "what you please." Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than in the narrative of the golden calf (strictly speaking, "bull calf"). The cult conducted by the high priest Aaron is not meant to serve any of the false gods of the heathen. The apostasy is more subtle. There is no obvious turning away from God to the false gods. Outwardly, the people remain completely attached to the same God. They want to glorify the God who led Israel out of Egypt and believe that they may very properly represent his mysterious power in the image of a bull calf. Everything seems to be in order. Presumably even the ritual is in complete conformity to the rubrics. And yet it is a falling away from the worship of God to idolatry. This apostasy, which outwardly is scarcely perceptible, has two causes. First, there is a violation of the prohibition of images. The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God. [My note: and talk about being spoiled! These dummies actually saw God in his cloud form when he met with Moses, to say nothing to have witnessed all of the miracles of Moses, such as the parting of the sea. Sheesh. The Pope is being kind!] They want to bring him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand. Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one's own world. He must be there when he is needed, and he must be the kind of God that is needed. Man is using God, and in reality, even if it is not outwardly discernible, he is placing himself above God.

This gives us a clue to the second point. The worship of the golden calf is a self-generating cult. When Moses stays away for too long, and God himself becomes inaccessible, the people just fetch him back. Worship becomes a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, and making merry. The dance around the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking worship. It is a kind of banal self-gratification. The narrative of the golden calf is a warning about any kind of self-initiated and self-seeking worship. Ultimately, it is no longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one's own resources. Then liturgy really does become pointless, just fooling around. Or still worse it becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise. All that is left in the end is frustration, a feeling of emptiness. There is no experience of that liberation which always takes place when man encounters the living God.

(Ratzinger, 200, p 22-23).

About heaven: attention parents/young people

While watching Mass this morning an analogy to help understand heaven occurred to me, one that is based on obvious scriptural statements as made by Jesus, but with a modern context so that even the very young can understand it.

This analogy will help everyone understand heaven, faith and the issue of sins better, but it will most especially help young people, particularly little children, thus I want to teach this to parents. Young people, especially as you go into the world (school, college, etc.) this understanding will be an enormous help to you too.

Heaven is like your home that you leave before going on a long journey. It can only be opened with one key and you carefully guard that key, which you must take with you, as you travel from place to place. At the end of your journey you put the key in the lock, open the door and return home forever.

Now, here is why this analogy is so scriptural and illuminating. First of all, the key is your soul, given to you when you are conceived, as your soul is made by God in heaven. So God makes every person their individual "key" to "return home," after death, to heaven.

You can explain this to very young children very easily, as soon as they are able to understand that they are watching mommy or daddy use a key to open the family house or apartment. You can explain that God has given to you an individual, but invisible, key that allows you to open the door to your place in heaven when it's time for you to go there.

As children grow older and they begin to be exposed to other children of unbelieving parents, and are put in increasingly unbelieving places, such as school, you can explain it as this. If mommy or daddy allowed the key to be lost or bent, it will no longer allow the family home to be opened (don't traumatize your kids about actual lost keys, LOL). Explain that just like if the parents were irresponsible about the house key, a child who is tempted to do bad things by other kids is risking making their key dirty, bent or lost. So they need to feel sorry for kids who don't understand that they have God given keys, and who put their keys at risk, but do not be tempted to do the same. That is how you can start to explain sin (in addition to the traditional way of it being a bad thing), by putting it in an absolute God context, but one that is lovingly oriented rather than punishment oriented.

Young people, as you become preteens and teenagers, college students, drop outs or new to your first jobs, (Hi again, always happy to know that many of you read my blogging! ;-) you can now really relate to how I am describing the key. This key is not a computer generated key, easily duplicated, like keys to dorms or many hotels. There's not a locksmith who can duplicate based on the shape or number of your God given key another key if you lose it. This is an individual eternal key, only for you and irreplaceable.

So when you are tempted to sin by your posse or by the many opportunities around you, understand that you are giving your key a whack, or getting some serious dirt on it, that may rust or bend it, especially over time. That's the risk of lots of "little sins," as Neil Young said, "rust never sleeps." It's not just the big one time sin that one must worry about, but continued abuse of your key resulting in it being so abused it no longer fits in the lock, or it is lost, in the sense of only opening a door to hell, rather than opening the door that has been prepared for you and is your birthright in heaven.

No one who is human is perfect, but Jesus Christ, even as he was incarnated in human flesh, he alone was both perfect and perfected by God. Jesus was perfect and sinless from the moment of his conception, but he was also perfected in a process by God in order to be the Messiah and Savior. The analogy is that if perfection is gold, Jesus was born as pure gold, and then shaped into a form that all human beings can wear. That's how something that is already perfect, and in this case only Jesus was perfect, can be "perfected" by God. That's what the scripture means when it says Jesus "learned." It's not like he didn't "know" everything that was God's will, but he was being shaped in his perfection to be accessible in his public ministry and also ultimately as fulfilled Savior to be accessable to all who seek him and believe.

Thus there is a continual balancing act of knowing that one is not perfect and is increasingly surrounded by an increasingly sinful and imperfect people with recognizing that God is forgiving and merciful. If you understand the key analogy you understand how you can sin and be forgiven, but you can also have a bad surprise that you have pushed it too far and your key is lost or ruined when you die. This will help you to better discern what temptations are "worth" taking, such as they are. Little children who hit other children, for example, in addition to getting traditional parental discipline and behavior formation by their parents can also have it explained to them that when they hurt someone like that, it is as if mommy or daddy used the key to their house to hit someone. Not only is it wrong and it hurts but it also risks damaging the key.

Now, here is where this analogy can help you to understand the difference-the very dire difference-between a sin that is of the usual sort and a sin that leads others to sin. When you sin you damage, rust, and otherwise put at risk your key's condition, one that, thankfully, can be forgiven and restored by God if confessed and repented sincerely by you, and that path of sin is totally abandoned. However, what if you are a false prophet who leads others to sin and/or to false beliefs about God, including the occult and the denying of Jesus Christ and the one true God? You are damaging other people's keys, and you can never restore them again. People you lead astray from the faith go through their lives with damaged keys, and you cannot ever repair what is done to their keys (only God can do that, but if these people do not believe and repent, and become pure again to God, and not tainted by the false beliefs and sin you have led them to, and they've now adopted, how will they ever avail themselves of God's ability to forgive and "repair" them and their keys).

That is why Jesus warns that it is better to pluck out one's own eye or cut off one's own hand if that is the limb or organ being used to sin. Jesus is warning you that it's better to have only one hand than two if you still have your key intact. (This is not a pagan self mutilation formula by the way, but an ANALOGY by Jesus. Anyone but an ego maniac and/or drug or booze addict would understand that one is not expected to body mutilate in reality, I mean, duh). This is why I think my analogy supports the scriptures in a modern context. Even a blind man can find the lock on his house and insert the key if he (or she) had kept the key safe and intact.

This is why Jesus issues too a most dire warning to those who lead children to sin (saying they might as well put a heavy stone around their necks and throw themselves into the water). Jesus is warning that even worse than leading one's own self to sin (and thus one should symbolically cut off that eye or that hand), one's entire life (and key) is lost when one encourages and leads children to lose their keys to heaven. I tell you, you should shudder, as this is not the imaginary hippy groovy Jesus who thinks smart mouth unbelieving drug taking mean and sexualized children are a product that you should be honing and developing in any way shape or form. Those who not only lose, bend, rust and profane their own keys but also lead other, especially the children, who have no choice, to do so are truly totally doomed. Trust me, hell is packed with both false prophets and also those who lead children to sin (and thus put them on sinful paths that destroy their own keys as adults when they grow up bent).

OK, that's the dark but truthful side, suitable for adult/teenager discussion. Let's go back to the light filled and hopeful side, which is to use this gentle, but totally scriptural, analogy of the key to help your children know, love and serve God better, and preserve their own places in heaven, more easily, in an increasingly poisoned and difficult world.

As an aside, I've mentioned before that young children need to be told about the reality of God, particularly, for Christians, through Jesus Christ, from the earliest age. This is usually done by mentioning God daily (such as saying Good Night to him, particularly as parents do nightly prayers with their kids). I've mentioned that a traditional way is to have a picture of Jesus and have the very young kiss Jesus good night, or at least tell him good night :-)

What I wanted to mention is that, sadly, those of you who are married to military service people, who are away on duty, have much experience with children remembering their parents through pictures, while they are gone. Kids get messages from their on duty parents through the computer, videos, phone messages and calls, and also photographs. Just as that works and is very helpful, you young people can now understand the wisdom of the traditional believers several generations ago, who used to have their kids know and love Jesus through even perhaps only one faded picture in the Bible or on the wall. It's just as if a modern child has the comfort and continuity of a picture of their in service parent. Again, it is crucial that, both new parents and those of you who have neglected this but still have kids you can talk to, you regain these traditional ways of making God part of your child's life from the very beginning.

It's not "up to them" or even is it up to your Church or Sunday school to do that, because if you do not tell them about their key in the home, they have no context for understanding God as a part of their real life, rather than later where God is an abstract set of rules, to be "believed or not." I mean, would you let your kid decide whether his father serving in Afghanistan "is real or not?"

I hope that this has helped.

About the importance of prayer

I wanted to just post a simple prayer, but while flipping through my books I found that I wanted to first share with you three paragraphs written by the late Pope John Paul II. This is from his book "Crossing the Threshold of Hope" where he responded to questions including the one "How Does the Pope Pray?" Here are three paragraphs from his longer answer.



The Pope's prayer, however, has an added dimension. In his concern for all the churches every day the Pontiff must open his prayer, his thought, his heart to the entire world. Thus a kind of geography of the Pope's prayer is sketched out. It is a geography of communities, churches, societies, and also of the problems that trouble the world today. In this sense the Pope is called to a universal prayer in which the sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum (concern for all the churches; 2 Cor 11:28) permits him to set forth before God all the joys and hopes as well as the griefs and anxieties that the Church shares with humanity today.

Prayer in our time, prayer in the twentieth century, should also be discussed. The year 2000 marks a kind of challenge. We must look at the immensity of good that has sprung from the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word [my note to my blog readers, for non-Christians the Incarnation of the Word means the birth of Jesus as the will and the word of God made into human flesh form] and, at the same time, not lose sight of the mystery of sin, which is continually expanding. Saint Paul writes that "where sin increased" ("ubi abundavit peccatum") "grace overflowed all the more" ("superabundavit gratia"; cf. Rom 5:20).

This profound truth presents a perennial challenge for prayer. It shows how necessary prayer is for the world and for the Church, because in the end it constitutes the easiest way of making God and His redeeming love present in the world. God entrusted to men their own salvation; He entrusted to them the Church, and, in the Church, the redeeming work of Christ. God entrusted this to all, both to individuals and to humanity as a whole. He entrusted all to one and one to all. The prayer of the Church, and especially the prayer of the Pope, must constantly reflect this awareness.



Here is another paragraph on this topic, so relevant to these times.

The Church prays for the dead and this prayer says much about the reality of the Church itself. It says that the Church continues to live in the hope of eternal life. Prayer for the dead is almost a battle with the reality of death and destruction that weighs down upon the earthly existence of man. This is and remains a particular revelation of the Resurrection. In this prayer Christ Himself bears witness to the life and immortality, to which God calls every human being.


One reason that I included this fourth paragraph is that I wanted you to understand that praying for the dead is not depressing and pointless, but the ultimate expression of faith and hope by the individuals and body of the Church in the immortal life to which God calls all. Implicit in this, though John Paul II does not address this here, is that even if someone who you know has deceased in a state where you might be quite certain that they had not accepted God, had not shunned lives of sin, and had might likely, therefore, "not been saved," it is an expression of your faith and hope that, if you so wish, pray nonetheless for your deceased loved one. The point is that no prayer is "wasted." Sometimes true faith is demonstrated only when you trust God in what seems to be impossible situations.


Mark 10:26-27
They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God."

Faith coaching for priests (pastors, rabbis, imams...)

This is the first in hopefully a series of quick coaching that I am directing toward priests of my faith, the Roman Catholics, but I also of course hope that not only any Christian pastor but also Jewish and Muslim spiritual leaders will find this helpful. The focus will be how priests need to understand and strengthen their own faith while thus at the same time strengthening the faith in the truth for not only their flock but the greater community. The concern being addressed is the way that modern society (both values and supposed "intellect") erode believers' faith, seeming to have "strong arguments," when they are simply wisps in the wind and totally fallacious.

How do I hope you use this material by the way?
1. Understand it yourself and read the scriptures that illuminate the points. I am structuring this series to be a "we believe in the Bible and the word of God" versus the "the Bible's not true and just made up stuff anyway" problem.
2. Discuss it with your friends, family and colleagues and watch for examples of what I speak of in the press.
3. Be more open to, in addition to your pastoral duties, seeking ways to communicate your faith and how you refute (gently but firmly) such arguments, not only in sermons but wherever you find an opportunity (get to know media people, ha).
4. But do not become a media hound. Allow your better understanding to simply permeate outwardly from you. As your faith is strengthened through better understanding of the truth, like osmosis other people will better understand the truth and thus their faith increases.

Here is the coaching point I am covering in this particular blog posting.

1. Recognize modern intellectual hypocrisy and point it out. Do not be intimidated by it because hypocrisy is, of course, the weakest of all foundations for either intellect or spirit. It is not by coincidence that Jesus focused on pointing out the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his time.

I have selected a very pertinent and popular topic for the hypocrisy example. There is a fascination in modern society, one that is increasingly perverse and warped, with "living forever" or at least extended life to be centuries or more in length. You may not think this is a "hot topic," but priests, you must recognize the undertow of what seems like disconnected interests of moderns. The undertow, this belief that humans can in and of themselves find a way to greatly extend life and even eliminate death, is exhibited in seemingly separate events such as these, which have been going on for decades by the way.

1. Paid for legitimate research into "special techniques" for extending life. Probably the most well known is by scientists who have linked a kind of starvation diet (very low calories) to long life spans of I think some sort of worm.

Now, I am not being critical of proper science that tries to correlate life style and genetics with those who tend to live longer, and then postulate some sort of potential beneficial advice for humans. I am simply pointing out that this is a hot topic for legitimate research.

2. Marginal "popular" research for extending life. This is more dodgy type of research, often fulfilling the researcher's (usually a book selling author with products) life philosophy that long life, even indefinitely long life, is possible.

The most common examples are those who advocate certain diets or food supplements.

3. The dark fascination in the media's science fiction and fantasy genre with life that is very long, both good life but more often a life of "superior oppressive beings" that live forever and oppress the dummies under them.

The Matrix series is an obvious example. While presented as drama and entertainment, two generations of young people have grown up with the thoughts that "maybe" some "eternal or long living evil alien force" is "manipulating humans." A normal person kind of wants to shoot themselves in the head with depression after watching some of this "entertainment." I'm bummed out to the max even thinking about it. But many kids have a constant diet of this type of paranoia and disconnect from reality, that eternity is "possible" but that right now "bad aliens" have it (or maybe "good aliens" can 'offer it.')

4. The vampire genre that is like a cancer among young people today.

Do not mistake that under the sex and drama and teenage angst of these films is the temptation to believe that by drinking blood one lives forever.

See, these are four modern secular examples of the same underlying temptation, which is to 1) seek to extend human life to eternity by totally human means and 2) disbelieve the Bible. Where does the Bible disbelief come into play here? I'm glad that you asked :-) because that is where the hypocrisy lies.

If one wants to truly and truthfully study how human life is extended, and how eternal life is obtained, one must believe the truth that is already documented, which is the Bible.

Point number one:

Genesis 6:3
Then the Lord said: "My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is but flesh. His days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years."

Now, modern disbelievers (plus believers weak in faith) need to understand, as you need to understand, one simple point about this passage. The author of the Book of Genesis, Moses, knew what 'scientifically' no one knew yet at the time, which is indeed that the length of human life is capped at one hundred and twenty years (Wikipedia has a great tracking of the "oldest" human beings in various articles, such as the woman who lived to 122 years). This is a really simple example that you must remember yourself and share with others that thousands of years ago God told Moses something that neither Moses or anyone else could have known through scientific means or the power of observation, since people barely made it out of their thirties for most of their existence until the last one hundred years or so. (See my previous blogging about this topic).

So this is where a hypocrite who is fascinated with extending life must agree with a true believer that even if the hypocrite still denies the Bible and God "being real," that the Bible is accurate in this fact. Keep it simple: recognize that God in the Bible tells Moses that humans shall "comprise" (for the most part) be able to expect from within one hundred twenty years for their lifespan, and modern statistics demonstrate that that has been and continues to be true. Agree to agree there that the "Bible got that one right."

Ah, but now the hypocrite will say, "But who is to say that science and human 'genius' and 'development' cannot extend life? We will do it in the laboratory!" That's great, because you do not, as a true believer, disagree that very long life is indeed possible!

Point number two.

Genesis 5
5. The whole lifetime of Adam was nine hundred and thirty years; then he died.
8. The whole lifetime of Seth was nine hundred and twelve years; then he died.
11. The whole lifetime of Enosh was nine hundred and five years; then he died.
14. The whole lifetime of Kenan was nine hundred and ten years; then he died.
17. The whole lifetime of Mahalalel was eight hundred and ninety-five years; then he died.
20. The whole lifetime of Jared was nine hundred and sixty-two years; then he died.
23. The whole lifetime of Enoch was three hundred and sixty-five years.
27. The whole lifetime of Methuselah was nine hundred and sixty-nine years; then he died.
31. The whole lifetime of Lamech was seven hundred and seventy-seven years; then he died.
32. When Noah was five hundred years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth.

This whole section of the Bible, Genesis, including Chapter 6 which comes after it is so misunderstood yet it is so simple to understand when one has faith AND logical reasoning. If the Bible were "fiction," then it would be filled with wondrous stories of what those long lived guys were up to during their nine hundred plus years of lifespan! Instead, Moses dutifully recorded what is basically the faith genealogy, such as... they were named this, they had these sons, and they lived this many years. That is hardly the stuff of riveting fictional adventure. If dry elderly Jewish men recorded that someone lived to be 777 years old, then that guy lived to be 777 years old!

So here is the hypocrite's problem. He or she believes that "someday" humans can "overcome death" and live very long lifespans, yet he or she does not want to believe the evidence that you present, in the Bible, that this has indeed already been done! Most scientists are happy when they have valuable data from a time in the past that supports their hypothesis. Hypocrites do not like data that supports even their own ideas, if that data comes from anything associated with God. They fear that if they believe that part of the Bible, then they have to believe the whole "package."

So you can attempt to get such a hypocrite to, like in point one, to agree with you that the very thing they argue is possible is documented in the Bible as having already happened. You'd think they'd be happy to know that some humans did indeed live to be almost one thousand years old, no? ;-)

The reason most hypocrites will resist agreeing that even having Biblical evidence that extremely long life is possible is that 1) they don't want to accept the whole God package, since they'd rather be free to sin, thank you very much and 2) they are looking ahead to disagreeing with you about the reasons for possible long life, so that will be point three.

Point three starts with repeating point one's passage, since that is why I quoted all the ages from Genesis 5, because God now says, basically, that the gift of some having these incredibly long lives is 1) provided by me, God, personally and 2) is going to be taken from you.

Point three:

Genesis 6:3
Then the Lord said: "My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is but flesh. His days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years."

Thus God is explaining to human beings two things. One is that the reason that these select people have lived so long is that God's spirit was in them. Read carefully "since he is but flesh." What that means is that God has, like with all the other animals, a limit to how long humans can live because flesh can and will deteriorate and die. God's spirit within certain humans overcomes the falling apart of flesh and keeps the person vital and alive for those many centuries. Remember, the Bible does not say that everyone (such as the wives or all the relatives, or the rest of the community, or other human beings) lived those long lives! It does not say that all human beings lived long lives at all. Rather, specific people are listed, those who have the spirit of God in them and are essential links in the chain of faith history. In other words, God extended the lives of those who handed on the truth of faith and its authoritative knowledge of the one true God from generation to generation. These old guys had the spirit of God in them to provide oral continuity from generation to generation about God, his ways and his will. Remember there was no writing or cave painting or whatever in the generations after Adam and Eve. So God kept each link in the faith chain alive enormous lengths of time due to his Spirit within them so that they can keep the faith alive and well formed in each generation. Thus around the time of Noah is when God starts to warn that he will no longer do this routinely.

Now, I have to go off topic for a moment because anyone who is a hypocrite will force you off topic in Genesis 6 because of the "sons of heaven" who "appeared on earth" and were "heroes of old, the men of renown," sounding all like alien angels and super beings arriving on earth. Not exactly.

We are all adults here so let's try to wear long pants and think like adults. We all know that Adam and Eve were the first parents, but we also know that their kids went and married humans who were around. Every five year old asks in Bible school "If Adam and Eve were the first people, who did their children marry?" Generations of nuns have squirmed about that question, LOL. Adam and Eve were the first faith parents, the first to whom were raised up from the dust because God spoke to them. I know, I know, those of you who don't believe that one of God's tools for creation is evolution are unhappy with me, but you have to read the Bible and believe. Adam and Eve's kids did not marry lions, deer, giraffes or turtles. Adam and Eve's kids married other humans who were around.

Likewise, as the faith grew and generations had fruitful future generations being born, they started bumping into other humans, nonbelievers (since they did not yet know God), those who built early human empires and who had made up mythologies.

Genesis 6:1-3
When men began to multiply on earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of heaven saw how beautiful the daughters of the men were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose. Then the Lord said: "My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is but flesh. His days shall comprise on hundred and twenty days."

What is happening here is clear if you just slow down and stay rooted in reality. People began to do pretty good, having many healthy children, and so they expanded, looking for husbands and wives for their growing brood (plus remember, not being in Eden they had to migrate and toil for their daily food). They bumped into marvelous people, calling them, as we do today, "heavenly." I mean, duh! The Bible does not say that flying saucers landed. If they had the Bible would say so, since God has nothing to hide. Notice that God immediately speaks in the now three times I've quoted line about the lifespan of mankind. Why does God explain to Moses (since this was all way before Moses' time, so he got all the information about Genesis directly from God) that the people started intermarrying "heavenly" people and that God was now going to withdraw his life extending spirit? Because now the people had to encounter and intermarry pagans and bring them into the faith. I mean, duh! It is what it is in the context of the times, not what fervid overactive modern imaginations make it to be. You'd understand it quite well if it read like this:

People began to have so many children, plus they had to migrate to find land and food, that they started bumping into some really tough and awesome people. They had some great treasures and incredible inventions! They thought our women were hot and so they eagerly intermarried. God then said, "Well, there you go, be fruitful and multiply. It's up to YOU to now educate the pagans about me, because I'm not going to make these old guys live to be nine hundred years old just to keep the faith alive from generation to generation." As soon as people started intermarrying these awesome heavenly people, other groups of new folks also came along ["the Nephilim appeared on earth" Genesis 4:6] and they explained that they came from the gods Bozo and Fifi who were filled with awesome sword swaggering deeds."

Um, duh, as the believers, the descendants of Adam and Eve, intermarried pagans, their kids eagerly picked up on all the local mythology and hero excitement of the new folks' histories (both real and imagined). So that's why when skeptics snicker that the Bible "includes mythology," well, duh, the people intermarried with people with mythology. Sometimes it just is what it is. And when "sons of heaven" "appeared on earth," that means some presumably God sent awesome dudes and chicks were bumped into that they had never met before around the next mountain range. When people say "appear on earth" they don't mean what moderns mean, which is to drop out of the sky, I mean, duh. People who had never traveled more than ten miles in their whole life consider anyone they met while migrating fifty miles or a few hundred miles away as "appearing" "on earth."

So point number three to make to hypocrites, which is usually a point of genuine confusion for many of the faithful, but also a great red herring for those who have an "alien believing" and "non all powerful God" agenda, is that there is an easily understandable progression of events that follows both what the Bible says and also human nature as we know it. God gave certain faith bearing humans really long lives, but as the human species got fruitful and on their way, God said, "You're on your own now, and you have to encounter nonbelievers and intermarry."

But see, how well did that turn out?

Genesis 6:5, 11-2
When the Lord saw how great was man's wickedness on earth, and how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was grieved...In the eyes of God the earth was corrupt and full of lawlessness...all mortals led depraved lives on earth...

The Bible agrees with human history since it is human history. Believers fell astray all on their own (think of Cain, for example) plus they obviously fell down at bringing the faith to the pagans, and instead, adopted lives of depravity and lawlessness.

I'll leave this important, but a tangent, to our basic purpose of discussing the hypocrisy of the long life interest but denying Biblical evidence, and hope that you better understand that you have to read the Bible in context, how people were in those times and how God spoke to them accordingly. A modern thinks that "heavenly" means from the sky, while an ancient believes "heavenly" means sent by God (and that could be just some hairy pagan sent by God from across the street). "Appeared on earth" means to a modern that it wasn't on the entire globe terra before, and thus came from the sky, while "appeared on earth" to an ancient means "Wow, I just encountered something entirely new."

Point four:

Genesis 9:29
The whole lifetime of Noah was nine hundred fifty years; then he died.

God made clear that he was weaning the faithful away from having very long lived humans who acted as faith links across many generations, and so Noah becomes the last one mentioned in this way. If you read all of Genesis 10 and 11, notice two things. No longer is anyone mentioned as having long lives. Second, the geneologies start to mention the faith fathers having children at ages of twenties and thirties, not the very ancient ages of before.

Genesis 11:25-6
Nahor lived one hundred and nineteen years after the birth of Terah, and he had other sons and daughters. When Terah was seventy years old, he became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran.

So now a life of 119 years is extraordinary, rather than the nine hundred plus years of life. Right on target of the expected maximum age, based on flesh, not God's spirit, for humans. Nahor is the grandfather of the man who became the Patriarch of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, Abram (renamed Abraham by God).

Point four, then, to show to your hypocrite friend, is that just as humans are prospering, and presumably eating better and having better hygiene and medicine, the incredibly long lived examples disappear. This is the heart of where your disagreement with hypocrites will be exposed because they will resist knowing that what they want is "possible" but it has already been done, since it is not works of humans that result in incredibly long existences of individual lives, but only the firsthand occupation of that flesh by the Spirit of God, which overcomes while the Spirit is there the inevitability of the limits of human life. Remind them we are not discussing "spirituality" or "holiness," but the actual raw, full Spirit of God keeping them alive, something God has not only said but demonstrated that after Noah he will no longer do.

God promises Abram that his descendants shall be as numerous as stars (Genesis 15:4), not the years of his lifespan, or of anyone else's. But this man obviously was filled with so much grace from the Lord that his body could not help but respond accordingly:

Genesis 25:7-8
The whole span of Abraham's life was one hundred and seventy-five years. Then he breathed his last, dying at a ripe old age, grown old after a full life; and he was taken to his kinsmen. [That means both buried in the family place and also with those who had died before in heaven with God. Jesus confirmed that Abraham is in heaven with God in Luke 16.]

So you have to point out that if the Bible was just self glorifying made up stuff, why would not the longest "made up" life be assigned to the man who was the Patriarch of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam? I mean, why would the fictional authors of the fictional Bible assign really long made up ages to men whose names are mentioned only that one or two times and had no great deeds, while Abraham is expected to be characterized as the role model of the God given full life in his service and actual physical presence of "only" 175 years? Because it really is just as it is. Abraham is the example of how the Spirit of God filled this one man, after the others, when God would no longer do this to keep faith guardian continuity, and yet achieves indeed eternal life by being with God after a full life on earth.

As an aside, many Christians totally miss that Jesus in Luke 16 is mentioning by name how the Patriarch Abraham is alive in God in heaven, not asleep: "When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried, and from the netherworld where he was in torment, he raised his eyse and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side...Abraham replied, 'My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received only what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented..."

Here is the point, the crux of what you must testify to non-believers, but also understand for your own faith. What is the reward for the man who singularly was the great Patriarch, who walked with, served without question, dined with, and advocated on behalf of sinners to God? A full (but not extraordinary) life but eternal life in God, where is he is seen, active, speaking and very real in life in heaven's eternity. So yes, we agree that long life is biologically possible, but not through human deeds in the laboratory.

Point five:
We agree that it is possible to live forever, but not in the laboratory and not because of aliens, but because when the flesh passes believers who have served God will have eternal life with him in the Spirit in heaven.

Hypocrites imagine "storing one's memories and identity" in a computer and then "loading it into another body," and THEY view THAT as a real "possibility," but they think the Bible, which affirms the immortal soul that is "transfered" upon death out of body to either heaven or hell, the spiritual realm, as "fantasy." That is the heart of the hypocrisy. Which is the sound of truth, the believer who has evidence in the Bible of the eternal soul, or someone who wants to become a parts junk yard for people who want to cling to some sort of "life," yet thinks only of earthly memories, personalities and nutty theories of recycled souls to load into some manmade flesh, and what, then, of the real soul, the one and only one given to each person by God for their one and only life? It's just not going to happen, friends. Not only because God has promised that it will not happen, but because life just does not work that way. Eternal life in fake bodies and you can't deal with AIDs? Swine flu? Feeding the starving? Keep a vaccination record for your kids so they don't get diseases that were defeated decades ago? And how about a world of robot ADHD people, with their bipolar and whatever? They don't seem to handle three decades of life well, say nothing of be "ready" for theoretical manmade "eternal life." A society that does not consistently wash their hands for hygiene sure does not have to worry about having eternal life in a body on earth, LOL.

Do you see the fulness of validation and logic for all that is in the Bible? Just as those few patriarchs had actual Spirit of God in them to prolong their life and their witness to their children and the other generations, upon death the faithful enter into the Spirit of God in heaven. On earth God infused each of the long lived patriarchs with his Spirit. In heaven they are alive eternally because they are put into the Spirit. It is only the Spirit that is the source of either eternal life after death, or of extraordinary genuine life on earth, but God has said he will no longer do that and of course that is true. It is up to humans to do the best they can do with having full lives, and allowing their neighbors to have full lives too, and to witness to the faith while they await eternal life that is promised to them in heaven, or eternal punishment if they profane God's gift of human life and thus lose eternal life in bliss.

Kids need to understand that the reality is much more beautiful than the fiction. Why does blood drinking "eternal" vampires seem so romantic? Because they have lost access to the true joys of life, of the type of joy that a man like Abraham had, in true family and kinship and service to God, and yes, decent adventure too.

Dear priests and other friends reading this blog, I hope and pray that you have found this to be helpful in your faith and to support the true faith of those who need it in these modern times.