The Spiral Path

Posted in "4 S's", Bible, Cause & Effect, Divine Love, Favourite Posts, free will, Jesus' teachings, Law (Nomos), Mother God, Realspiritik, redemption, theodicy, trust and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

09 Sep 2012

RS31: Jesus and the Book of Job

A: We’ve been talking a lot about your teachings on life and death, healing and miracles. Tell me why John the Baptist tried to kill you.* It seems a strange thing for a religious prophet to do.

J: John didn’t act on his own. It would be fair to say that my brother James and my former friend Peter used John. As we’ve discussed, John was suffering from major mental illness — schizophrenia combined with narcissism. If you played on his paranoia and his narcissism, you could get him to do your dirty work for you. This is what James and Peter did. They used John to try to get rid of me.

A: You describe Peter as your former friend.

“One of the ideas that sets the poem of Job apart from the Book of Job the Patient and from other ancient Near East poems about righteous sufferers is the book’s detailed pronouncement by the Lord that people who behave badly as Job’s friends need to apologize to both Job and to the Lord and to be retrained by an expert in the field, Job himself (chap 29).” (From commentary on the book of Job by Mayer Gruber in The Jewish Study Bible, TANAKH Translation, ed. Michael Fishbane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1505.) Photo credit JAT 2015, Lake Minnewanka, Alberta.

J: There’s a reason the Gospel of Mark portrays Peter in such an unflattering light in the final chapters of his book (Mark 14). Mark 14 should be subtitled, “The Truth About Peter That Peter Doesn’t Want You to Know.”

A: Peter comes across as a coward and a liar and a collaborator, a man who sits with the high priest’s guards and warms himself by their fire.

J: Yes. “Warming himself at the fire” is an ancient idiom for “saving himself by selling out to the enemy.”

A: Peter doesn’t seem like the kind of man you or any sane leader would entrust with the job of carrying on your teachings.

J: Peter was a fickle, vain, posturing man — a lot like Wormtongue in Tolkien’s The Two Towers — and he only gained a position of authority in the Kingston movement after I died and he could spread his lies about his “humility” and his “chosenness.”

People wonder why Mark shows me rebuking Peter with a remark about Satan. But it’s not a supernatural claim about Peter. It’s a psychological claim.

A: Mark 8: 31-33 says, “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things'” (NRSV translation).

J (nodding): Mark is telling his audience that Peter, who later claimed to be a faithful and devoted apostle, was, in fact, “the adversary” — like the adversary named Satan who tried to ruin Job’s life with his incessant legalistic wrangling, his incessant lack of faith in the mystery of love, his incessant rejection of God’s right to choose how he (they) will intervene in the world.

Later Christians have read the reference to Satan as a supernatural claim for the Devil. But in the book of Job, Satan isn’t the Devil. He’s the wily Materialist who sits on God’s council of heavenly advisers and insists that the man named Job is devoted to God only because he has many blessings — healthy sons and daughters, great herds of livestock, and many servants. Take away those blessings, says ha-Satan (the Accuser), and Job will curse God instead of loving him. It’s simple Cause and Effect.

“Have you not read this scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?” (Mark 12: 10-11). Photo credit Image*After.

But this isn’t what happens. Job tries and tries to understand the Law of Cause and Effect and invoke it for his own benefit, but his efforts fail. God — not the man named Job, and not the Materialist philosopher ha-Satan — gets the final say. In the end he chooses to restore Job’s blessings, but only because he chooses to, not because he’s been forced to by clever and lawyerly invocations of Law.

I had a lot of respect for the Book of Job. I didn’t understand it at all when I began my journey of faith. I understood it completely by the time I died. God doesn’t promise anyone an easy or pain-free journey. Faith has no foundation at all if it’s built on the premise that you’ll escape all pain by following the Law. Faith requires humbleness. Faith requires respect for all life in Creation, including behemoths and leviathans and — God forbid! — daughters who are named and given land alongside their brothers upon their father’s death.

Some commentators think God is pummelling Job at the end with reminders about God’s power. They think God requires Job’s submission to this power. But the speeches by God at the end of the Book of Job aren’t about power. They’re about humbleness. Humbleness as God and God’s angels understand it, not as religious leaders have taught it.

A: Humbleness as an intense awareness of who you are and who somebody else is. Knowing your strengths, and being proud to use your strengths in service to others, but also knowing your limits. Knowing who you’re not as much as knowing who you are.

J: Yes. This point is drilled home in Chapter 40 (verses 1 to 8):

And the Lord said to Job:

“Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?

Anyone who argues with God must respond.”

Then Job answered the Lord:

“See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?

I lay my hand on my mouth.

I have spoken once, and I will not answer;

twice, but will proceed no further.”

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

“Gird up your loins like a man;

I will question you, and you declare to me.

Will you even put me in the wrong?

Will you condemn me that you may be justified?” [emphasis added]

A: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge,” God says to Job in 38:2. The rejection of “words without knowledge” is very strong in your original teachings. Also the refusal to blame God for the mistakes made by narcissistic human beings.

J: A human being who believes he/she can control the Law of Cause and Effect is not a person of humbleness or faith. Job had to go through a lot of suffering to get this point through his thick head. But eventually he got it. Just as I eventually got it.

A: So I’m thinkin’ Peter never got it.

J: Bottom line, you can’t be in relationship with God if you think you are God, if you think you’re so wonderful and special that the very laws of Creation will bow down to your wishes.

It. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

A: Would it be too much of a stretch to say the Book of Job is an anti-narcissism diatribe?

J: No, it’s not too much of a stretch. Job’s four interlocutors — Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Naamathite, and Elihu son of Barachel — are brilliantly drawn “portraits” or “archetypes” for brain patterns that would be described today in psychiatric terms as DSM-IV disorders. Just because ancient writers and teachers didn’t have a DSM-IV doesn’t mean they couldn’t see these patterns of behaviour through careful observation.

A: I see a Ph.D. dissertation for somebody in that remark.

J: The important thing to bear in mind is that a person like Peter, who was narcissistic and convinced of his “right to be right,” will always, of necessity, be a coward. He has to be a coward, because only a coward won’t admit his own mistakes. The refusal to admit one’s own mistakes (especially to oneself) is a hallmark of narcissism.

A: It takes guts to be honest about your own mistakes. That’s one thing I learned the hard way.

J: Me, too, in my time.

A: Yet it’s deeply healing to be honest about one’s own mistakes.

J: It is. This is part of the reason for the great success of the Twelve Step method — you have to let go of your denial and be honest about the harmful choices you’ve made in the past.

A: But if another person tries to confront the denial, they can put themselves in harm’s way. You’ve talked in the past about your brother’s narcissistic rage reaction. I’ve been on the receiving end of similar rage reactions — most recently from one of the owners of the business where I work — and these rage reactions . . . they sure aren’t pretty. They’re violent in a way that’s hard to describe.

J: We talked a few days ago about the way in which a status addict tries to acquire status points by stealing part of another person’s inner self-image (Father of Lights and Mother of Breath — Again). Narcissists are always status addicts, so this “stealing mechanism” is an important part of their psychological profile. Narcissists are always trying to build themselves up by tearing other people down. It gives them a sense of power. Unfortunately, if you dare challenge the myth of their “rightful” power, they’ll go berserk. Literally berserk. Blood lust comes over them. A temporary form of insanity. If swords (or guns) are handy, they’ll use them. If iron swords aren’t handy, they’ll use whatever they can find to try to annihilate you, to rob you of your entire being so you’ll disappear into a cloud of nothingness. They’ll try with all their might to reach into your core self and rip out your heart so they can eat it and claim your power.

A: Yuck. Gross. It’s like that gross heart-eating scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But, you know, come to think of it, it’s exactly what my boss tried to do to me in January. She did her best to annihilate me. Didn’t work, though, because I forgave her for her brutal attack. I’m still there, and I’m still looking her in the eye.

She hates that. She hates it when I look her in the eye.

J: She knows at a deep narcissistic level that she has no power over you. This frightens her. It undermines the lies she tells herself. Your very presence reminds her she isn’t the nice person she claims to be. So she hates you. She has to hate you and she has to blame everything on you and the co-workers who stood up for you because otherwise she’d have to look at herself in the mirror and admit her own mistakes. She’s not going to do that. Not while she’s arranged her whole world to protect herself from the truth about her own motives. She thinks she’s safer this way, but she’s not. She thinks if she can “get rid of” the people who witnessed her narcissistic rage reaction in January (by forcing them to quit), all will be right with the world, and she can return to her merry little narcissistic belief that she’s the most wonderful boss there could ever be.

Her guardian angels have other ideas. For more details, please refer to the Book of Job, which could also be titled, “You’re Not Going to Want to Hear This, but God Has an Opinion on Your Narcissism.”

* Please see the February 6, 2011 Jesus Redux post John the Baptist and Jesus and the May 15, 2011 post John, Paul, and James: The Lunatic, the Liar, and the Lord.

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Posted in Bible, Cause & Effect, faith, Favourite Posts, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, humbleness, Jesus' family of origin, John the Baptist, Law (Nomos), Mark vs Paul, Materialism, narcissism, occult themes, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness, Son of Man and tagged ethical mysticism, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

29 Jul 2012

RS19: Paul’s Trinitarian Theology

A: Since our last discussion a couple of days ago, I’ve been pretty confused, to be honest, and I was wondering if we could go back over a few of the points you raised. Would that be okay?

J: Yes. We covered quite a bit of ground, introduced some new concepts. So ask away.

A: Thanks. Well, partly I’m still struggling with this idea that Paul’s religion is marketing God like a shampoo brand. It’s just so materialistic — small “M” materialistic — and I don’t see any connection between this idea and the idea of faith. I find it hard to believe that millions of Christians would agree to participate in such a crass pursuit. I mean, where is the sense of faith — the sense of ongoing relationship with God — in a religion that’s selling God like this week’s special at Walmart?

J: Well, Paul’s version of divine shampoo is more like the $4.99 brand that’s relabelled under the table and sold in a high-end salon for $89.99 as the best product for the best people.

A: But expensive shampoo is still just shampoo. It’s not faith.

Cockleburs - Sticky and Nasty, but Very Effective

“Jesus said: The Kingdom is like a man with a treasure of which he is unaware hidden in his field. He died and left the field to his son. His son knew nothing about it and, having received the field, sold it. The owner came and, while plowing, found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to anybody he wished (Gospel of Thomas 109). Paul, who came after Jesus and Jesus’ confused disciples, saw the opportunity to take the buried treasure of faith offered by Jesus and lend it out to others with a promissory note for future salvation. Obedience was the interest Paul charged. In this photo, the cockleburs that can stick to your hair and clothing as you walk through field and forest are like Paul’s teachings: covered in nasty hooks but very effective. Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: No. It’s not faith. But as you and I have discussed before, religion and faith are not synonymous with each other. Religion is an organized social, political, and economic institution, an institution that can be used under certain circumstances to create a desire for obedience among the middle and lower classes of society. As a tool for creating social cohesion, it can be quite effective — at least, for a while.

A: Social cohesion is good. But people still need faith! People long to feel that deep inner connection with God that makes them feel whole.

J: Yes. So within the annals of a religion such as Christianity, you see a constant tension between the people who are seeking God — that is, people who are yearning for faith — and the people who don’t give a hoot about God but are seeking to tap into the hidden power that underlies all universal laws. The ones who don’t give a hoot about God are the ones who have dictated the path of orthodoxy in the Christian church as it’s known today.

A: So you mean there were church leaders who didn’t actually believe in God? Who were atheists or maybe agnostics?

J: Let’s put it this way. The vast majority of church leaders whose writings have been preserved were not writing about God. They were writing about Paul’s Spirit — Divine Law writ large.

A: I noticed in my theology courses that orthodox theologians over the centuries relied heavily on Paul and much less on Mark, Matthew, and Luke for scriptural authority.

J (nodding): Paul is the biblical source for Trinitarian theology. John is usually considered a source, too, but John’s personal theology wasn’t as sophisticated as Paul’s, and didn’t have as much influence. Mark contains no Trinitarian theology, and not much usable Christology, either, from the point of view of Paul and his successors. Paul’s writings, though, are a font of “wisdom” on the topic of tapping into the hidden power of the universe. I say that facetiously.

A: Of course. So tell me more about Paul’s Trinitarian theology. You seem to be making a link between Paul’s Trinitarian teachings and the theme of selling God as a shampoo brand. But I confess you’ve lost me. I don’t quite see the connection. Could you explain that?

J: In the time when I lived, philosophy and religion and science were hopelessly intertwined. They were intertwined in a way that’s hard for people today to relate to. Chemistry and physics and medicine weren’t treated as subjects that were separate from philosophy or religion. They were treated as subjects that were subordinate to, or dependent upon, the highest aspirations of the human mind: pure philosophy or pure religious law. But devotion to philosophy or devotion to pure religious law (as in the case of the Essenes in my day) were both attempts to understand the immutable laws that lie behind everything that happens here on Planet Earth. So when you tried to study chemistry, you weren’t really studying chemistry. You were looking for the hidden religious laws that governed the chemistry. You were looking for the religious laws that applied not only to the metals you were extracting from base ores but to the people in your religious community. You were looking for the universal principles of authority, power, dominion, status, and chosenness. You were looking for proof — validation — that your religious teachings were correct and other groups’ teachings were wrong. So science was usually a means to an end — a religious end. Needless to say, this got in the way of objective scientific research.

A: That mindset still exists in certain quarters today.

J: Yes. But during the first century CE, the religious leaders who had the most credibility, the widest acceptance, were the ones who tried hardest to crystallize the mysteries of Divine Law, philosophy, and science into a simplified “package.” Paul was very good at this. He squeezed Law, philosophy, and science together into one shampoo bottle. Then he shook them up hard so you couldn’t see the separate strands and try to pull them apart. He labelled the product as “God.” But what Paul described as God has nothing to do with God the Mother and God the Father as they actually are.

A: Still not getting it.

J: Paul wasn’t interested in knowing who I was as a person. Paul wasn’t interested in knowing who God the Mother and God the Father were as people. He was only interested in his agenda of proving his own authority.

A: His authority as a messenger of God?

J: No. His authority as an avenging angel, sent to Planet Earth to spread the true message about Spirit — pure, formless, timeless, insuperable Law.

A: He wasn’t trying to teach people about God?

J: Like all severe narcissists, Paul was incapable of conceiving of God as a person — or as two people, which is what I taught. Narcissists can’t see anybody except themselves. They can’t see their own children as separate, worthy human beings, so they certainly can’t see God as separate, worthy beings. For narcissists, the world fractures into many different forms of myth — monistic myths, dualistic myths, and hierarchical myths. This is the only way they can make sense of their own internal suffering, their own internal experience of emptiness.

A: But Spirit is different because Spirit isn’t a person — it’s a formless cloud of endless power. I get it. It’s a projection! The narcissist is projecting his own internal self-image onto the universe around him. Spirit is pure power, pure ascendancy, pure authority — with no need at all for messy emotions like forgiveness or devotion or courage or trust! I get it!

Okay. So how does this relate to Trinitarian theology?

J: Paul’s invocation of Spirit, God, and Jesus Christ is alchemy.

A: Alchemy? Now my head is really starting to hurt.

J: When you try to force the actual laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and math to conform to pure religious law, pure religious authority, you’re practising alchemy. I’m defining alchemy as an attempt to control all the powers of “chaos” for the purpose of creating order and harmony.

A: By “powers of chaos” you mean things like . . . entropy?

J: No. I mean God the Mother and God the Father as they actually are. In Paul’s view, and in the view of many of his successors, God has not been behaving properly, and has done very illogical and unfair things such as allowing earthquakes to hit major religious centres and requiring saintly figures to die like everybody else. This implication is so clear in Paul’s teachings that a century or so later in Rome one of his most enthusiastic followers, Marcion, would create a firestorm of controversy by suggesting there was a hierarchy of gods in Creation, with a jealous, vindictive god who rules over this world, and above him, a supreme god who is just and loving but who remains “unknown” to people on Earth except through the revelation of Jesus Christ. For Marcion, Paul was the messenger of this great and radical truth about the unknown god.

A: So Paul was trying to force both God and you to “obey” Spirit, which is the supreme and formless cloud of knowing and love and justice?

J: Exactly.

A: By squishing you all together into “One”?

J: He would have thought of it as “reintegrating” broken pieces of divine truth that had fallen out of their proper places. Pieces such as the Logos (me). And Charis (grace), who was Paul’s God.

A: Frig. This is so complicated. And so Gnostic. I like your teaching about God as two loving parents much better. Paul’s version is so . . . so fluid. So malleable. So nebulous and undefined. So conveniently changeable. So easily manipulated, depending on the circumstances.

J: In a previous post you described the Trinity as a shell game. That definition still applies.

Posted in Cause & Effect, faith, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, Law (Nomos), Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Realspiritik, Trinitarianism and tagged ethical mysticism, Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

27 Jul 2012

RS18: Paul’s Understanding of Spirit

A: It’s been several months since you and I have had one of these conversations. Thanks for picking up the discussion again.

J: No problem. It’s been a busy few months for everyone.

A: Yeah. I’ve had an awful time at work since the beginning of May. The current financial climate is affecting people’s brains in unusual ways. The owners of the business where I work aren’t willing to take responsibility for mistakes they’ve made over the past few years, and now those mistakes are coming back to haunt them. Only they don’t want to blame themselves. So they’ve been blaming their long-time staff members — the same staff members whose suggestions they ignored when it would have done some good! Is this normal? Is it normal for business owners to shoot themselves in the foot — and the head — this way?

J: Unfortunately, it’s extremely common. But it’s not new. It’s not a new problem. And it’s not limited to businesses that deal in ordinary goods and services. Religious businesses fall prey to the same issues of narcissism and lack of accountability.

A: You mean . . . churches? That kind of religious business?

J: Could be. But religion is a huge business world-wide. Always has been. So the same “boom or bust” cycles that are evident in world financial markets today have always existed in the profitable world of religious marketing. Religious marketing is a business like any other. It’s not “separate” or “sacred” simply because the item being bought and sold is God.

A: Ouch. That makes God sound like a shampoo brand.

J (shrugging): In the early church founded by the apostle Paul, God is a shampoo brand. I’m the conditioner that smoothes out the tangles. Paul is the famous face who rakes in a few extra bucks by hawking the brand to a credulous audience.

A: But a shampoo brand? Isn’t that a bit . . . crass?

J: As a metaphor, it’s not very dignified or sacred, is it?

A: No.

J: Nonetheless, when you strip away all the lies and circular arguments and cliches, and look at Paul’s claims about God — and me — in the cold, hard light of reality, you’re left with the fact that Paul is selling soap. A very fancy form of soap, to be sure, but soap nonetheless. “Buy this soap so you’ll be clean enough to escape Hell and pass inspection at the entrance to Heaven.” This is what Paul is selling.

A: But . . . I can see the link between Paul’s sin — “being dirty” — and Paul’s salvation — “getting clean.” But how is God the soap, the shampoo? How can a person buy God the way a person buys a bar of soap?

J: Ah. Well, that’s the important part. In Paul’s theology, and in the theology of the Essenes who highly influenced Paul’s beliefs, God is the powerful Creator of Heaven and Earth, but God himself isn’t the highest authority. God is subject to an even higher force: the power of Cosmic Law. Paul calls this Cosmic Law by a name that’s now interpreted in a way that makes his original meaning hard to see. Paul calls the Law “Spirit.”

A: What?

J: Paul’s theology pays tribute to God, and tries to insert a brand-friendly Saviour into the mix (Jesus Christ), but the primary focus is always Spirit. In Greek, pneuma. For Paul, Spirit is an anthropomorphic cloud of knowing that is literally the breath — the life — of all Creation. The in-and-out breath of pure energy, pure life force, pure power that can be trapped and used if properly understood. Pneuma is a higher force than John’s Logos (Word). It’s a higher force than God himself. God is pure Mind. God is pure Mind and Jesus is pure Word. Both are sacred mystical forces, and both are worthy of attention, in Paul’s estimation. But neither Mind nor Word is the ultimate source of cleansing and purity and salvation. The ultimate source of power is Cosmic Law — Spirit — to which even God and Jesus Christ must bow. He who knows the Law in its purest form knows how to force God and Jesus Christ to obey his wishes. He who knows the Law can “buy” God like a bar of soap and force God to cleanse him and let him into Heaven. It’s simply a matter of being smart enough to make the Law work to your benefit.

A: That’s so grasping, so greedy, so arrogant and narcissistic. That’s not faith — that’s human greed at its worst.

J: Yes. It’s impossible to overstate the interconnection between narcissism and belief in occult magic.

A: How did we get onto the topic of occult magic?

J: Paul, the founder of Pauline Christianity, believed deeply in occult magic. He was teaching his followers how to practise his own form of occult magic, how to recognise and control the forces of nature, how to gain control over life and death, how to force Jesus Christ and God to obey the contract laws of the universe, how to secure a place on the ladder of spiritual ascent that will lead through all the levels of Heaven until mystical union with the cloud of knowing is one day accomplished.

A: Is any of this in the Bible?

J: It’s all in the Bible. A detailed examination of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians reveals a bumper crop of occult teachings that are founded on his belief in the invincibility and inviolability of contract law.

A: So there’s a connection between contract law and occult magic?

J: Absolutely. If there’s no contract law governing all cause and effect in the universe, then there’s no basis for occult magic. Occult magic is based on the clear and logical belief that “effect” consistently follows “cause.” If you can figure out “the cause” — that is, the hidden cosmic law that’s operating behind the scenes — then you can manipulate “the cause” to create a controlled “effect.” It’s straightforward classical physics. It’s all very logical. Occult magic and alchemy are both founded on highly logical principles. Both are also Materialist philosophies, philosophies that rely entirely on Cause and Effect principles, and may or may not include a belief in God. Faith in God is not required as part of a successful Materialist philosophy. Only confidence in humanity’s ability to understand and control the Laws of Cause and Effect is required.

A: Except the universe doesn’t actually operate according to simple Newtonian laws.

J: True. But don’t tell the narcissists this. No narcissistic wants to hear he’s not in charge.

A: So Paul believed he was in charge? He believed he was so clever he could actually control the forces of nature through his occult rituals?

J: That was the point of his new religion. The point was NOT to teach people how to be in relationship with God. The point was to teach people how to purify themselves so Spirit would be forced to give them “special gifts” in accordance with divine contract law.

A: You’ve said before that Paul hated and feared your teachings and wanted to undermine them. So if he feared you so much, why would he drag you into his new religion? Why would he name you as Saviour and insist his followers invoke your name to achieve salvation?

J: You’ve stumbled onto it right there. It’s all about name magic.

A: Name magic?

J: The deeply occult belief that if you can correctly name an entity, you can control that entity. It’s part of the belief in the law of cause and effect. In this case, there’s a belief that names have great power, that the true name spoken aloud around certain rituals can force a powerful figure to appear from the Heavens and obey the wishes of a human being. Paul feared me, but he also believed I had hidden knowledge about God that I could be forced to reveal to him and his followers if he correctly named me as the Christ (Messiah or Anointed One).

A: Did it work?

J (laughing): Not a chance. For starters, I wasn’t the Christ, and never claimed to be. For another, I have free will, and nothing any Christian has ever said or done has held any power over me or any other angel. And for another, magical thinking and occult rituals belong within the sphere of major mental illness in human beings, so angels DO NOT RESPOND to any prayers or beliefs grounded in occult magic.

A: Including the Eucharist that Paul instituted?

J: Yes. Communion wafers should come with a warning tag on them: “Belief in transubstantiation will guarantee you a seat on the slow train to redemption and healing.” Angels can’t abide the occult intent of Paul’s original Eucharist ritual. It’s a version of selling you divine soap to clean your dirty innards. And the soap they’re selling is the body and blood of a divine being who’s being named, then eaten, then controlled from inside your “heart” so you can get special gifts. How gross is that?

A: This is one reason why I’ve stopped going to church. I just can’t handle the abusive way God is being treated any longer.

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Posted in Cause & Effect, Essenes, Law (Nomos), occult themes, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Realspiritik and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

02 Jun 2012

TBM40: What Sheldon Cooper Can Teach You

When the writers and producers of the hit TV comedy The Big Bang Theory first envisioned the character of Sheldon Cooper, I’m sure their main goal was to craft a truly funny show. I’m sure they couldn’t have known their blend of spot-on writing and Jim Parson’s brilliant acting would end up creating an iconic portrait of the human brain’s Darwinian Circuitry. But just as the writers of The Big Bang Theory are always referencing some of my favourite series — series such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Wars — I’m going to reference their Sheldon Cooper character as a way to speak accurately about the realities of the human brain.

Wind Turbines (c) Jamie MacDonald 2009. Used with permission of the artist. Every time I see a wind turbine, it reminds me of the ruthless logic of the brain’s Darwinian circuitry.

Jim Parson’s portrayal of theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper is hilarious because it’s 100% accurate in scientific terms. The humour works because the science works. In this case, the science they’re showing (albeit unwittingly) is the science of a brain that’s operating entirely on its 3D Darwinian Circuitry without benefit of the soul’s gifts of empathy, heart, and dignity.

I know it sounds really hard to believe that a person can function at all without using every part of the brain. We assume a person can function with only one kidney or one leg, but it never occurs to us to ask whether the same analogy applies to the brain. We tend to think of the brain as a single organ — either a whole brain that functions wholly and properly or no brain at all — so we give people the benefit of the doubt with regard to their internal thinking processes. We assume that if they can do all the basics — go to school, get a job, make everyday decisions — then their brains must be operating the way they’re supposed to.

But there’s a problem with this assumption: the basic tasks of going to school, getting a job, and making everyday decisions require the brain to use only one “software suite,” whereas it actually has two. Basic tasks require the brain to use only its Darwinian Circuitry, a “suite” of software devoted solely to 3D biological survival. The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry carries the programming for all things related to your body’s biological needs — food, water, clean air, sleep, protection from the elements, protection from predators, procreation (which is more optional than most people think), and relief from pain. In our culture, school and jobs and money and status are regarded by the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain as essential tools for survival. So anything to do with money and status are given extremely high priority by the Darwinian Circuitry, even it means pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, as our character Sheldon Cooper has done.

So efficient is the Darwinian Circuitry that it can carry out important survival tasks without any input at all from the brain’s Soul Circuitry. Of course, without input from the soul, survival tasks won’t be carried out with empathy. Or with trust. Or humbleness. Or gratitude. Or humour. Or anything resembling conscience. But they’ll be done, by god, and they’ll be done with the viciousness and cold logic of an S.S. death camp commander.

These are the kinds of selfish, conscience-free behaviours that idiot atheists such as Richard Dawkins have promoted as the “truth” about human nature. I see a lot of similarities between Richard Dawkins, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the Christian Apostle Paul.

Dawkins has coined the phrase “the selfish gene,” and at a certain level the label is accurate. There are stretches of genetic material in our DNA that are meant to boost our awareness of our individual survival needs. Otherwise how would we instinctively know how to run away from danger?! But these are not the only kinds of coding we have in our DNA. We also have coding for unselfish traits. We also have coding for traits such as empathy, trust, humbleness, gratitude, humour, and conscience.

In the language of personality theorists (a branch of psychology), we have to be able to account for the five universally observed dimensions of personality — Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness — and we have to be able to account for all five of these dimensions in the face of aggressive arguments from behavioural psychologists and evolutionary biologists that human beings are nothing more than a collection of selfish genes seeking to reproduce themselves in the most efficient way possible.

So here’s how it actually works. The Darwinian Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing traits that fall within two of the five dimensions: Neuroticism and Agreeableness. The Soul Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing the other three dimensions: Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness.

Yeah. It really is that simple.

Sheldon Cooper is an absolutely perfect representation of what happens to a human being’s behaviour and relationships when he falls into the trap of relying exclusively on choices that score very high on the Neuroticism and Agreeableness scales, and very low on the Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness scales. He becomes, well, he becomes a Sheldon.

This package of traits is distinctive and highly recognizable. You get a person who’s highly controlling; perfectionistic; tense around other people; resistant to sudden change; inflexible; always “right”; quick to anger; thorough but lacking in imagination; socially compliant but lacking in genuine empathy; obsessive or obsessive-compulsive; politically conservative or right-wing; and rigidly obedient to the Law (dogmatic). The latter trait — rigid obedience to the Law — is especially important to understand in its proper context as a Darwinian trait because it’s often wrongly confused by researchers with traits from the Conscientiousness dimension.

The Darwinian Circuitry of the brain is very good at what it does (when it’s in balance with the Soul Circuitry) but on its own it’s very “black and white” in its thinking. It looks for simplistic “Cause and Effect” patterns. It looks for rigid “laws” that can be applied quickly and easily in all situations. The Darwinian parts of the brain “recognize” Materialist philosophy and codified religious texts and scientism (that is, treatment of scientific thought as an infallible religion). There’s NO capacity in these parts of the brain for processing complex emotions such as empathy, humbleness, courage, and forgiveness. On the other hand, logic and law are elevated to the status of the divine. You can see these patterns plain as day in Sheldon Cooper’s self-absorbed devotion to pure logic.

If you’re familiar with the Big Five personality theory, you’re probably saying to yourself that I’ve got the Agreeableness dimension all backwards and I obviously haven’t read the material carefully. I’ve read the material, and I think the scale for Agreeableness has been written backwards. High scorers on the Agreeableness dimension are harder to sort out in research studies because status addiction affects this dimension more than it does the other four. For instance, generosity and altruism may be genuine (in which case they’re coming from the Soul Circuitry and belong on the Extraversion dimension). On the other hand, generosity and altruism may be nothing more than status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing (which means they’re coming from the clever tactical centres of the Darwinian Circuit, and should stay right where they are on the Agreeableness dimension, since Agreeableness is focussed on social strategies that enhance 3D biological health).

A philanthropist who can’t donate money to a worthy cause without seeing his/her name emblazoned in big letters on the outside of a new research centre is suffering from a severe case of status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing. This behaviour deserves a high score on the “I’m-doing-it-to-survive-on-the-social-ladder” scale.

Giving, of course, is good. If you’re giving from your heart and soul, you’ll have no trouble giving anonymously and forgoing any credit for your generosity. It should be fairly obvious, though, that giving to others so you can earn yourself lots of status points is not so good from the soul’s point of view.

Poor Sheldon Cooper. He can follow the rules of social conventions by rote, but he doesn’t understand them. He doesn’t understand why he’s not supposed to call his twin sister “inferior genetic material.” He doesn’t understand why Leonard wants to be with Penny in emotional, intimate, heartfelt ways. He laughs when it’s socially appropriate, not because he gets the joke, but because he knows at a Darwinian level that he’s supposed to. He’s a classic Platonic Philosopher-King who believes in his own superiority and not much else.

He’s busted from top to bottom. But this doesn’t stop him from bossing other people around and using pure logic to abuse the people around him.

Not that Sheldon thinks he’s an abuser. In his own eyes, he’s a really nice guy.

This is why he reminds me so much of the Apostle Paul.

RS10: The Soul’s Blended Logic

A: Hey, I like that new maxim you wrote a few days ago when I was grousing and complaining about the landlord I was stuck with until recently: “The measure of a man is how he decides to behave when the Law is placed in his hands. The righteous man uses the Law as a club to beat others down. The humble man sees that if he places the Law upon the pedestal of his own courage he will have a lever to raise others up.” Yeah, that about sums up my experience with my ex-landlord, Shane. When Ontario rental laws were “on his side,” he was all for quoting the law to his tenants and telling them the law prevented him from doing anything to resolve tensions or disputes. Of course, when the law was on our side — the tenants’ side — that was different. When the law was on our side, we were just troublesome, difficult tenants, in his view, not important enough to respond to in a timely and ethical fashion when there were issues. Not a nice man.

J: You think so. But inside his own head he thinks he’s the most wonderful guy in the world. A real “people person.”

A: If he were the most wonderful guy in the world he wouldn’t have treated me the way he treated me when I gave him notice I was moving out. He wouldn’t have treated the other tenants the way he’s been treating them. He would have responded promptly to the serious maintenance issues that have arisen in the building over the past few months. He would have kept the building in good shape, as the previous landlords did. He wouldn’t have tried to pass the buck to other people. He’s a real pro at passing the buck.

J: What I’m about to say probably won’t cheer you up much.

A (sighing): Go ahead. I’m ready. I think.

J: The way your ex-landlord operates is considered normal, acceptable behaviour by many “successful” business people. And it’s nothing new. This kind of behaviour is as old as humanity itself. In each generation there’ve always been some people who think it’s okay to climb their way to the top by kicking other people down. Any history book will reveal this reality.

A: And a lot of films, too.

J: In my day it was no different. I didn’t have to go very far to see it and feel it, either. Within my own family there were plenty of unfortunate examples of this kind of behaviour. I was raised to think in positive ways about slavery, about treating other human beings as property. This was normal. Commonplace. Acceptable. If you came from a family of honour, you just didn’t think of slaves as people, as individual beings with their own thoughts, needs, relationships, and dreams. They were there to serve you. The Law said so. Religious, political, and economic law all agreed on this (though in my time these forms of law were hopelessly intertwined with each other). The Law said it was proper to own slaves. So we owned slaves. As did almost every aristocratic household in the first century Mediterranean world. It was wrong, of course, for us to endorse slavery. It was profoundly abusive and morally unjustifiable, but hey, the Law said it was okay. And the Law couldn’t be wrong, now, could it?

A: From time to time I come across Christian writings that enthuse about the “enlightened” Laws of Jubilee in Leviticus. Yes, right in the Bible it says that every 50 years a man who lost either his property or his freedom to debt-holders will get it back in the Jubilee year. “Each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his family” (Leviticus 25:10).

Yeah, right. Like that was ever going to happen. People willingly giving back land and slaves to the original owners after many decades? Don’t think so. And just who were the original owners? If you think about it logically, and add one Jubilee onto another, all property would have to revert to the one who owned it all “originally” — like, maybe thousands of years ago. So whoever could establish the strongest and oldest legal claim to the land would own everything, presumably, if you follow the logic of Jubilee. Which sounds pretty on paper but has no basis in human reality.

J: As you long as you appear to be doing something Lawful to protect slaves and indentured servants, you can still pretend you’re a nice person who cares about others. A real “people person” who’d give your shirt off your back for a complete stranger.

A: You know, there are all kinds of theories these days about the Historical Jesus — who you were, what you were teaching, what kind of relationship you had with the Pharisees and Sadducees and Romans. They try so hard to squeeze biblical verses into understandable boxes so they can define the boundaries of the particular box you were in. They seem to think that if they can define the right box they can finally define you. But it’s not like that. You weren’t living in a definable box, where certain Laws told you what to do and when to do it. You were that guy with the pedestal who wants to use the Law as a lever instead of a club.

J: When people are raised up instead of beaten down they always surprise you. You can’t predict what amazing things they’ll do. You just have to step back and let them do their thing. Human beings at their best are totally unpredictable, yet they’re not in any way illogical. Human beings at their best live according to the blended logic of heart, mind, body, and talent, and this logic is amazing. It’s the blended logic of the soul. Creative. Spontaneous but also cautious. Organized but not obsessive. Funny as hell. Capable of tears. Capable of quiet reflection. Capable of great action — but not constantly so. Deeply grateful for a relationship of love and faith and trust in God. Able to tell right from wrong.

A: Which does not describe some of the people I know.

J: Exactly so. A great many adolescents and adults have stopped using the parts of their own brains that are dedicated to advanced emotions such as creativity, spontaneity, grief, contemplation, trust, and the biggie everybody wants to know about . . . divine love. The less functional a person’s brain, the more obsessive he or she becomes about the Law. The traditions of Law — including “family honour,” which is Law in its worst incarnation — are crucial to those people who’ve stopped listening to input from the Soul Circuits of their own brains.

A: Why? Why do people become righteous about the Law when they lose access to their own empathy?

J: A full answer to that question would fill more than one book, but the simple answer is that they’re frightened to death of the void they feel inside themselves. There’s a huge cost involved when you choose to ignore big chunks of your own brain. If you were to tie your dominant hand behind your back and refuse to use it for years, there’d be a huge cost to that, too. First your hand would weaken, then it would wither, and eventually you’d get ulcers and infections, possibly leading to incremental amputation, even system-wide sepsis and a swift death. Would this be a good thing? Would a sane person do this? Probably not. Yet every day human beings choose to do this kind of thing to their own brains. They choose, under societal pressure, to stop listening to input from the smartest parts of their own brains. Then they’re surprised when they feel like crap! They profess to be totally mystified by the sense of emptiness they feel inside. Well, ya know, that’s gonna happen when you force your own brain to shrink — to literally shrink in size within the confines of your own skull.

A: You don’t sound very sympathetic.

J: I have forgiveness for their choices, but I also have a lot of exasperation. I mean, come on, folks. What you put in your brain matters!

A: A favourite theme of yours.

J: Many people get caught in a vicious cycle. They choose to stop listening to the input of their own inner wisdom. Then they start to feel restless and empty and confused.

A: And angry.

J: And angry. After a while, they may get tired of feeling this way, so they look for answers that make logical sense to them. At this point, many will stumble across various forms of religious Law. The Law gives them answers that seem to make sense if they’re suffering from big holes (literally) inside their brains, holes that make them feel lost and listless and helpless. The Law gives them an external framework to cling to. However, the more they choose to lean on the Law, the less they use the parts of their brain they most need to “hear” — their intuition, their common sense, their empathy and faith. This leads to an even greater sense of futility and disconnection from God. So they redouble their efforts to “properly understand” God’s Law through more prayer and more self-denial and more study of scripture. Which means they’re again ignoring their own inner intuition, common sense, empathy, and faith. Which leads to further imbalance in the brain’s functioning. Which can lead directly to the anguish felt during “the dark night of the soul” — a never-to-be-sought-after state of severe neurophysiological breakdown. Famed theologian Augustine of Hippo arrived at his conclusions about God and the soul through this very process.

A: No wonder Augustine’s teachings on Original Sin make no sense.

Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, Jesus' family of origin, Law (Nomos), Original Sin, psychopathy (niceness), Realspiritik, slavery, Soul and tagged brain-soul connection, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

24 Aug 2011

RS3: Learning to Like God

A: Jesus, why do you think there’s so much resistance to the idea that God is actually two distinct people, two distinct consciousnesses, a Mother God and a Father God working together to bring new life into being?

Learning to Like God Doesn’t Mean You Have to Stop Having Fun (c) JAT 2013

J: I don’t think there’s one simple answer to that question. Human beings have been struggling for thousands of years with questions about who God is. The important thing to bear in mind is that people of faith have usually been in conflict with people of religion, regardless of place or time or culture. People of faith, wherever they live, are the people who listen for God’s presence with their hearts and bodies and minds and souls and courage. People of faith have a tendency to get sucked into groups run by people of religion. I’m defining “people of religion” as those who choose to obey the Laws and the Prophets.

A: Whose laws and whose prophets?

J: Everybody’s religious laws and everybody’s religious prophets when those laws and prophets contradict the obvious truths which God speaks to all people of the world each day.

A: Such as?

J: Such as the obvious truth that relationship is the foundation of all life. Human babies aren’t plucked from trees like ripe figs. At some time, there has to be an intimate relationship between male sperm and female ova. Even if this connection takes place in a test tube.

A: That hasn’t stopped scientists from cloning animals. And trying to clone human beings, I’m sure, though I doubt they’re talking out loud about this kind of Mengelian research.

J: The media have been creating the impression in the popular imagination that cloning is an easy, harmless, reliable, Newtonian process that obeys simple laws of Cause and Effect. Why, soon there’ll be home cloning kits for you on the shopping channel! Just think! You’ll be able to clone dear ol’ granny! The reality of cloning is much more complex, however. Beyond all the hidden struggles in labs and the fudged data and the attempts by major corporations to try to patent DNA that doesn’t belong to them, there have been serious failures and inexplicable weaknesses in the cloned creatures.

A: How do God the Mother and God the Father respond to these cloning projects?

J: The same way they respond to other acts of human psychopathy. They allow observable consequences to unfold so other people can see for themselves what a stupid idea it is.

A: Boy, sometimes it takes an awful lot of pain to get regular people to see the observable consequences of a stupid idea.

J: Human beings have free will. They can choose to be greedy and selfish, as many corporate researchers are choosing to be, or they can choose to be compassionate and clear-headed. Many of these corporate researchers see no contradiction in also being practising conservative Christians or Jews or Muslims because Abrahamic orthodoxy insists that God has given human beings special rights and privileges as “sovereigns” over all creatures of Planet Earth (Genesis 1:28 and, by inference, Genesis 2-3). Many, many religious people have assumed this means they can do whatever the hell they want on Earth, and God will simply nod and smile and say, “My, what a good boy you are!” Obviously, there’s something wrong with this picture.

A: Nuclear weapons spring quickly to mind.

J: Yes, plus toxic wastes poured into the ground and water. Diversion of major fresh water sources. Drilling for oil in unsafe and harmful environments such as thousands of metres below the sea bed. There’s not a lot of common sense or clear-headedness — let alone compassion — in any of these choices.

A: Yet you’re not advocating that we give up all technology and return to an ancient agrarian lifestyle.

J: No, I’m not asking people to give up their phones and their cars and go live on a barren mountaintop to get closer to God. On the other hand, a little balance might be nice. People might spend a little less time with their phones and their cars and a little more time with their children.

A: But that would mean spending time on their relationships.

J: It never ceases to amaze me that pious folk who refuse to treat anyone but themselves with respect will turn around and insist they have all the answers about how to be in relationship with God. How can a person who knows nothing about relationships claim to be an expert in relationships? How can a man who treats all women as inferior claim to know who God is? It’s narcissistic bullshit, nothing more.

A: These guys are too busy throwing themselves on their status-saturated swords to notice they’re not very nice people.

J: In orthodox Western Christianity, the image of God is very much one of the old bearded guy in the sky who’s throwing himself on his status-saturated sword for the sake of all those little peons who are too weak and sinful to make any good relationship choices ever.

A: God as the ultimate narcissist. No wonder so many people of faith have rejected the traditional Christian image of God. What’s to like?

J: It’s pretty hard to love and trust somebody when you believe there are no grounds to even like him or her.

A: So . . . it would make sense for the church of the third millennium to show people ways in which they can like God the Mother and God the Father as people and as divine parents. That way they can start to build a solid, respectful, daily relationship with God.

J: Naturally, it will come as no surprise that having a respectful relationship with God is no different than having a respectful relationship with your neighbour. If you can’t treat the one with kindness, you sure as heck can’t treat the other.

It’s only common sense.

+22

Posted in Church of today, faith, free will, Law (Nomos), Mother and Father God, Mother God, psychopathy, Realspiritik, the right to be right, theodicy and tagged science & faith | Leave a Comment

02 Jul 2011

JR54: The Meaning of "the Son of Man"

A: We’ve been talking a lot about the Kingdom and gardens and finding peace through personal responsibility. How does the phrase “the Son of Man” fit into all this? If ever there was a phrase in the New Testament that people don’t understand, it’s the “Son of Man” phrase — ho hyios tou anthropou in Koine Greek, bar nasa in Aramaic, and ben adam in Hebrew. Somehow I suspect the translation of the Greek phrase into English doesn’t do justice to the original meaning.

J: It’s very easy to forget that the Hebrew word adam wasn’t used primarily as a name in Second Temple Judaism. Adam can also be translated as “ground/soil” or as “humankind.” Similarly, the Greek word anthropos meant “humankind,” not just “human beings of the male sex.” These nuances are lost in the traditional English translation “Son of Man.” A much better translation in English would be “essence of humanity” or “highest potential of humankind.” I used the phrase ho hyios tou anthropou to express a concept — a concept for which no vocabulary existed at the time.

“Jesus said: Adam came into being from enormous power and wealth, but he was never worthy of you, for had he been worthy of you he would not have died” (Gospel of Thomas 85). This saying doesn’t make much sense unless you stop to consider what Genesis 2-3 says about the allegorical relationship between humankind (Adam) and God. In the Garden of Eden, there are two trees that embody the deepest and most mystical elements of God, Creation, and faith: (1) the tree of life and (2) the tree of knowledge of good and evil. These two trees are supposed to be in balance, and while they are, Adam and Eve live a life of trusting relationship with God. At some point, however, Eve, followed quickly by Adam, decide they’re more interested in having knowledge than in having a trusting relationship with God. So they eat of the metaphorical fruit from the tree of knowledge and find themselves aligned with the many ancient philosopher kings who also chose knowledge over relationship with God. In Jesus’ teachings, choosing a life that places knowledge far above trust, love, and relationship with God is really no life at all. For Jesus, the mind is important, but not more important than the heart. So the metaphorical example of Adam and Eve — who lost the balance between mind and heart and as a result struggled for the rest of their lives with “death” instead of “life” — is not the example we should be following. Seek instead the path of peace that’s based on relationship with God. This ivory depicting The Fall of Man (by Balthasar Griessmann, c. 1670-1690) is part of the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

A: What concept were you trying to teach about? Enlightenment?

J: No. Forgiveness.

A: Sayings 85 and 86 in the Gospel of Thomas refer to “Adam” and to “the son of man.” Saying 85 says, “Jesus said: Adam came into being from enormous power and wealth, but he was never worthy of you, for had he been worthy of you he would not have died.” Saying 86 goes on to say, “Jesus said: Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay down his head and rest.” Thomas 86 also appears almost word for word in Luke 9:58. How do these verses relate to the concept of forgiveness?

J (sighing): I’ve always been fond of word plays, puns, alliterations, rhymes, and poetry. “Foxes have holes and birds of heaven have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head” sounded catchier in Greek than it does in English.

A: But I guess the important thing to keep in mind is the fact that you weren’t talking about a particular man in this saying. You weren’t talking about yourself. You were trying to explain a concept that was unfamiliar to your students.

J (nodding): The people around me had been raised on a steady diet of values that had no place in humanity’s relationship with God the Mother and God the Father. No matter where you turned, you heard tales of might, tales of glory, tales of revenge. Everyone thought they had the “correct” God — or gods — on their side. Everyone thought they were truly pious, truly deserving of divine reward. Everyone had their own version of the “God will avenge me” myth. The avenging God had as many “faces” as a circus performer has costumes.

If you were a person with a black sense of humour — as I came to be — you could go to bed in the evening and count all the ways you’d offended this god and that god in umpteen hidden ways on that day alone. You could count all the ways you’d be punished. You could count all the ways your masters would take revenge against you for your “heinous crimes” against God. Of course, it was your earthly masters — not the unseen gods of heaven — who were the ones who had the rod in their hands to beat you. It was your earthly masters who would use any “divine” excuse possible to beat you into submission and humility.

But they’d often go easy on you if you offered a payment. Some sort of compensation — an eye for an eye. Some sort of bribe. Contract laws dictated what terms of compensation were acceptable. These contract laws weren’t civil laws in the way you’d understand a Western nation’s legal codes today. These contract laws had political and economic purposes, of course, but they were primarily religious laws and traditions. Nomos in Greek. Nomos provided a list of crimes and a list of acceptable “payments” to balance the scales if you committed a crime. Often these “payments” were sacrifices. Temple sacrifices. In most Greco-Roman religions of the time — not just Judaism — you could bring a sacrifice (a payment, really) to the local temple so you could literally “buy back” God’s favour. This is what “redemption” used to mean. It meant trading something you had — money or goods or livestock or agricultural produce — to get something you needed: divine favour. It had nothing to do with divine love or divine forgiveness as you and I have defined these concepts on this site.

A: And then there was slavery. The actual buying and selling of human beings based on contract laws. A slave could, under certain circumstances, “buy back” his rights. Or a slave could be manumitted — legally freed by his or her “owner.” But contract law gave people the excuse they needed to treat others cruelly. Contract law justified their cruelty.

J: They gave themselves permission to violate the soul’s own understanding of free will, justice, integrity, and respect. They were listening to their own selfishness and not to God’s voice. And I said so. Out loud. Frequently.

A: So your friends and students were conditioned to understand their relationship with God in terms of contract law. In terms of payments to a master or sovereign lord. In terms of monetary debts or “obligatory service contracts” (i.e. slavery).

J: Slavery was — and is — a terrible violation of the soul, of what it means to be a soul, a child of God. Slavery is an artificially created human condition in which a slave’s personal boundaries are invaded in every way imaginable. A slave is forced to give up all rights to physical and sexual safety. All rights to choose where and with whom to be in relationship. All rights to follow his or her own soul’s calling. Even a slave who has property — and there were many wealthy slaves in the Roman Empire — even such a slave is taught to believe he doesn’t actually own the skin he’s in. It’s not his. It belongs to somebody else. His own skin is “dead” to him. His mind and his heart may be free, but his skin — his body — is dead. He can’t view himself as whole — as a “whole bean” — because in his own mind and in the mind of his society he isn’t whole. He’s a sort of ghoulish inhabitant of a body that belongs to somebody else. If, in addition to being a slave, he’s also sexually violated — a fate that was brutally common for young boys and girls in the first century Empire — chances are extremely high that he’ll grow up to be seriously mentally ill. Why? Because children who are beaten and sexually abused and psychologically tortured bear the scars of that treatment in their biological brains, bodies, and psyches until they are healed. It’s a simple statement of fact.

A: You can see how this kind of treatment would lead to dissociative disorders. A person who’s disconnected from emotions. Disconnected from a strong sense of boundaries and personal space.

J: I was trying to get at the point that even lowly foxes and humble birds are given their own personal space, their own “home,” their own sanctuary by God. Foxes and birds will defend their own homes with all their might, as they have a right to do. They don’t have the right to steal another creature’s home, but they do have the right to protect the one they have. God gives no less a right to all human beings. No human contract law “written in stone” anywhere at any time can supersede the obvious truth that each human being owns his own skin and is the sovereign of his own domain, his own personal kingdom. When he knows this and feels this and lives this, he feels alive. He feels whole. He feels at peace.

A: This is the state of “living” that you refer to so often in the Gospel of Thomas.

J: Yes. It’s a psychological state of balance and health. There’s nothing occult about it. It’s the natural outcome of making choices that lead to emotional maturity. It’s the natural outcome of choosing to live according to the highest potential of humankind. It’s the truest essence of humanity.

A: People being their best selves. On purpose.

J: Yes. On purpose. It’s so very much about the purpose. About the purposefulness of “living.” Which is where forgiveness comes in.

A: How so?

J: Christians are usually taught to think of forgiveness as an act of grace on God’s part, as a somewhat sudden and fickle choice on God’s part, as something that human beings can participate in but can’t initiate. Paul tries very hard to give this impression to his readers. But forgiveness is the opposite of suddenness and fickleness and “divine transcendence.” Forgiveness is purposefulness. Purposefulness of a particular kind. Forgiveness is what you get when you choose to combine your free will and your courage and your love. There’s nothing accidental or preordained about it. It’s a choice. An ongoing choice that calls upon the greatest resources of the eternal soul — each and every soul. It’s the choice to love someone wholly in the absence of payment or retribution or just compensation. Divine forgiveness is not settlement of a debt. Debt doesn’t enter into the equation. Education, mentorship, and personal responsibility enter into the equation, but not debt.

A: This is soooooooo not what they taught me in theological school.

Posted in Book of Genesis, boundary issues, forgiveness, free will, gender and sexuality, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), life and death, Peace Sequence, relationship with God, religion and mental Illness, slavery, Son of Man and tagged Kingdom teachings, The Peace Sequence | Leave a Comment

04 May 2011

JR36: Saying 56 in the Gospel of Thomas

A: When we wrote last time (“Father of Lights, Mother of Breath”), I ran out of time, and we didn’t get a chance to return to the question of Saying 56 in the Gospel of Thomas. I was hoping we could continue that discussion. (For the record, Stevan Davies translates Saying 56 as “Jesus said: Whoever has known the world has found a corpse; whoever has found that corpse, the world is not worthy of him.)

J: I can’t help noticing the irony of a person who’s “alive” having a discussion with a person who’s “dead” about the question of “alive versus dead.”

A (rolling eyes): Very funny. I prefer to call you “molecularly challenged.”

J: Hey — I left some bones behind when I died. Traces of them are sitting in a stone ossuary in a warehouse owned by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Kinda reminds me of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A: The IAA can have them. I somehow doubt you’re going to be needing them again.

J: Well, you know, there are still people on the planet today who believe in the concept of bodily resurrection on the Day of Judgment. According to that way of thinking, I might actually need to retrieve my bones so I’ll be complete on the final day of judgment.

A: Hey! You’re not supposed to have any bones. According to Luke, you ascended bodily into heaven — at least once, maybe twice! (Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:1-11). Prophets who are “beamed up” aren’t supposed to leave body parts behind. That’s the whole idea.

J: Nobody gets out of a human life “alive.” At some point, the biological body reaches its built-in limits, and the soul returns to God in soul form. There’s no ascension. Never has been, never will be. Luke is lying.

A: Maybe Luke just didn’t understand the science of death. Maybe he was doing his best to explain something he didn’t understand.

J (shaking his head): Luke was lying. On purpose. If Luke had been sincere and well-meaning — if misguided — he would have to stuck to one story about my ascension. But one man — the man we’re calling Luke — wrote two scrolls together to tell one continuous story. He wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles as a two-part story. The Gospel finishes in Bethany, the hometown of Lazarus (who was the subject of a miraculous healing), and the last thing we hear is about is the disciples. Apparently, they obediently returned to Jerusalem to continually pray.

A: Yeah, like that was gonna happen.

A major problem for the spread of Pauline Christianity among Jews and Gentiles was the Eucharistic ritual instituted by Paul. A lot of people didn’t like the idea of ritualistically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a divine being. So one of Luke’s jobs, when he wrote the two-part Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles, was to soften the impact of it for newcomers, while preserving Paul’s occult meaning for those who were “in the know.” What you see at the end of Luke’s Gospel and the beginning of Acts is a slyly written (and entirely fictitious) account of twelve men who are “chosen” for the special privilege of receiving the Cloak of Glory from the Holy Spirit after they’ve properly prepared themselves for 40 days in the presence of the mystical body of Christ. They eat from the mystical body in order to purify themselves for the coming baptism of fire on Pentecost. Then, on the appointed day, the twelve (well, thirteen, if you count Paul’s later baptism of fire) suddenly receive the intense fire of Glory that Luke says was promised to the twelve by God through Jesus. After that, nobody is allowed to challenge the authority of the apostles. Please note that if you’re having trouble following this narrative in its established biblical form, there’s a good reason for that: the secret knowledge wasn’t meant to be easily understood by everyone. Interestingly, though, the themes of this secret knowledge have been found in other religious traditions, too. For instance, in this photo of the Tantric Buddhist deity Acala, “the Immovable One,” he is braced by the fiery tongues of phoenix flame — much like the fire delivered to the apostles at Pentecost. Who doesn’t like a really good bonfire when Divine Power is the prize? This wooden sculpture is on display at the British Museum. Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: Meanwhile, when you open up the book of Acts, which picks up where Luke left off, you get a completely different story from the same author. In Acts, he claims that after my suffering I spent 40 days with my chosen apostles in Jerusalem, and then was lifted up by a cloud from the Mount of Olives (which is just to the east of Jerusalem’s city walls). The Mount of Olives is closer to Jerusalem than Bethany, the “authentic” site of my so-called Easter ascension in the Gospel. Luke also adds two mysterious men in white robes to the Acts version of the story. These two sound suspiciously like the two men in dazzling clothes who appear in Luke’s account of the tomb scene (Luke 24:4). Luke is playing fast and loose with the details — an easy mistake for fiction writers to make.

A: Well, as you and I have discussed, Luke was trying very hard to sew together the Gospel of Mark and the letters of Paul. Mark puts a lot of focus on the Mount of Olives — a place that was most definitely not Mount Zion, not the site of the sacred Temple. Luke probably needed a way to explain away Mark’s focus on the non-sacred, non-pure, non-holy Mount of Olives.

J: You wanna bet the Mount of Olives was non-pure! It was littered with tombs. Religious law dictated that no one could be buried within a residence or within the city walls, so it was the custom to bury people in the hills outside the city walls. To get from the city gates of Jerusalem to the top of the Mount of Olives, you had to pass by a number of tombs and mausoleums. If you got too close to death, though, you were considered ritually impure, and you had to go through a cleansing and purification process once you got back to the city — especially during a big religious festival. Mark’s Jewish audience would have understood this. They would have wondered, when they read Mark, why there was no concern about contamination. They would have wondered why the Mount of Olives became the site of important events when the purified Temple precincts were so close by. It would have defied their expectations about death and purity and piety.

A: This was easier to understand when the Temple was still standing.

J: Yes. It would have made a lot of sense in the context of Herod’s humongous Temple complex. It started to make less sense, though, after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE.

A: A fact that Luke took advantage of.

J: Yes.

A: Mark doesn’t include the saying from the Gospel of Thomas about corpses (saying 56), but Mark’s portrayal of you shows a man whose least important concern is ritual purity — not what you’d expect at all from a pious Jew, in contrast to Matthew’s claim about you (Matthew 5:17: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”)

J: Matthew says this, but Mark says the opposite.

A: Not in so many words, but by showing your ongoing choices and actions.

J: Later Christian interpreters wanted to believe that God had given me special powers over demons and sin and death, and this is how they understood Mark’s account of my ministry. But this isn’t what I taught. I didn’t have the same assumptions about life and death that most of my peers had. It’s not that I had special powers over life and death — it’s simply that I wasn’t afraid of life or death. I wasn’t afraid to “live” and I wasn’t afraid to “die.” I wasn’t afraid to embrace difficult emotions. I wasn’t afraid to trust God. Maybe to some of the people around me it seemed that I had special powers, but I didn’t. All I had was maturity — the courage to accept the things I couldn’t change, the courage to accept the things I could change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

A: The Serenity Prayer.

J: Yes. It seemed to me that Creation is much more like a rainbow than like night-versus-day. It seemed to me that the world I lived in was not “evil” and “corrupt,” as many occult philosophers had said. (Including the Jewish sect of Essenes.) Yes, there were corpses, it’s true. People died. Other creatures died. Beautiful flowers died. But obviously death led to new life, and wasn’t to be feared. Death wasn’t the enemy. Fear of the self was the enemy. Fear of trusting God, fear of trusting emotions such as love and grief, were the obstacles between individuals and God.

To get over those fears, you have to face your initial fears about death — about “corpses.” You have to begin to see the world — Creation — in a new, more positive way, and accept — even love in a sad sort of way — the corpses. You have to stop spending so much time worrying about your death, because it’s gonna happen whether you like it or not, and no religious ritual can stop it. Accept that it’s going to happen, then focus on what you’re doing today. Focus on the Kingdom of today. Build the love, build the relationships, build the trust. Physical bodies come and go, but love really does live on.

“My friends, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4). Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: Some people might take that as an endorsement of hedonistic behaviours or suicidal behaviours, since, in your words, death isn’t to be feared.

J: There’s a big difference between saying “death isn’t to be feared” and saying “death is to be avidly pursued.” If you avidly pursue death, it means you’ve chosen to avidly reject life — the living of life to its fullest potential. Trusting in God means that you trust you’re here on Earth for a reason, and you trust that when it’s your time God will take you Home. What you do with the time in between depends on how you choose to view Creation. Is God’s Creation a good creation, a place of rainbows where people can help each other heal? Or is God’s Creation an evil “night” that prevents you from ever knowing the pure light of “day”?

A: What about those who’ve chosen to view Creation as an evil place of suffering, and are now so full of pain and depression that they can’t take it anymore? What happens to those who commit suicide?

J: God the Mother and God the Father take them Home and heal them as they do all their children. There is no such thing as purgatory or hell for a person who commits suicide. On the other hand, our divine parents weep deeply when families, friends, and communities create the kind of pain and suffering that makes people want to kill themselves. There would be fewer tears for everyone if more human beings would take responsibility for the harmful choices they themselves make.

A: And learn from those mistakes.

J: Absolutely. It’s not good enough to simply confess the mistake. It’s important to confess the mistakes, but people also have to try to learn from their mistakes. They have to be willing to try to change. They have to let go of their stubbornness and their refusal to admit they’re capable of change.

A: Easier said than done.

Posted in Essenes, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Thomas, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Law (Nomos), life and death, Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God, Talpiot Tomb and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

20 Apr 2011

JR34: Chaining God to the Rock

A: I’d like to return to an idea that was endorsed in Karen Armstrong’s book (The Spiral Staircase), the idea that “when speaking of the reality of God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can usefully do (page 292). I find this idea self-serving and smug. I also find it very demeaning. In fact, I find most religious ideas about God to be self-serving, smug, and demeaning. Demeaning to human beings and demeaning to God. Since this is Holy Week, it seems like a good time to talk to you about your thoughts on the reality of God and what this reality can mean for our lives.

“Jesus said: If they ask you, ‘Where are you from?’ reply to them, ‘We have come from the place where light is produced from itself. It came and revealed itself in their image.’ If they ask you, ‘Are you it?’ reply to them, ‘We are his children. We are the first fruits of the living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign within you of your Father?’ reply to them, ‘It is movement. It is rest.’ (Gospel of Thomas 50 a-c).” Photo credit JAT 2021.

J: I see you’re still upset about the way people are talking about God.

A: I’m upset about the fact that theologians and mystics are not being honest with themselves and with others. I’m upset about their “closed-shop” attitude. I’m upset about their tiny, closed, pessimistic view of God and Creation. I’m upset about their narcissistic refusal to open wide the doors of theological inquiry. I’m upset about the pettiness. I’m upset about the way religion teaches — or actually doesn’t teach — people to be in relationship with God. I’m especially upset about the religious rituals that get in the way of the relationships.

J: The crucial problem here is worship.

A: Worship?

J: People of faith all over the world are trying to be in relationship with God. Their souls long to know God, to feel the Presence of God in their daily lives. They long for the comfort, the solace of that love. But among those millions of people, how many of them do you think have actually felt that Presence?

A: Not many. You can tell by the look in a person’s eye when you put the words “trust” and “God” in the same sentence. People of faith are disillusioned and very, very hurt.

J: There are three great obstacles to the experience of relationship with God in the daily life of regular human beings. The first obstacle we’ve talked about a fair bit — the role of status addiction in creating suffering and abuse in the lives of humans and other creatures on Planet Earth. Status addiction is deeply imbedded in all major world religions, even the non-theistic ones. Status addiction in a religious setting becomes a self-reinforcing cycle that ruins lives.* The toxic effects of status addiction have not yet been recognized. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how the Vatican could continue to uphold its teachings on sin, separation from God, sacraments, and salvation in the absence of status addiction. Status addiction is one of the three main glues that hold together the Vatican house of cards.

A: Being named Pope is quite the status symbol. Right now the History Channel is showing “The Borgias,” the mini-series about the corrupt family that owned the Papacy at the turn of the 16th century.

J: The second of the three glues holding orthodoxy together is a tenacious belief in the Law of Cause and Effect — the Materialist philosophy you and I have been discussing. What’s astonishing about this belief system is its arrogance. It’s completely oriented towards the supremacy of human beings. The term “anthropocentric” hardly begins to capture it. The Law of Cause and Effect, whatever its particular religious manifestation, teaches people that the Law is more important, more effective, and more divine than God. They say the Law is merely a manifestation of God’s wishes, but what they really mean is that God is utterly bound by all the provisions of the contract law — sort of like Prometheus chained to the rock. This is the source of human religious authority, the foundation on which they claim all their status, power, money, fame, and sexual gratification. This is also the source of human psychological authority — the need to assuage one’s own suffering by claiming there really isn’t a personal God who intervenes in people’s lives. The need for narcissists to obtain psychological authority has never been adequately examined or addressed in the church. The last thing a status-addicted narcissist wants to hear about is a personal God who isn’t chained at a safe distance and who can generate consequences for the narcissist’s smug self-idolization. Today.

A: Okay. What’s the third glue of orthodoxy?

J: The third is worship. I’m defining worship as any spiritual practice that centres around the goal of escape.

A: I’ve never heard that definition of worship before. I tend to think of “liturgy” and “worship” as being more or less the same thing. You go to “worship” on Sundays, and the exact form of this worship is the liturgy — the specific prayers and hymns and sermon content for that particular day.

J: There’s the source of the confusion right there. There’s nothing wrong with liturgy. There’s nothing wrong at all with the idea of people getting together once a week to say some prayers and sing some hymns and hear an uplifting, encouraging, inspiring sermon and maybe even sit together in safe, companionable silence. It’s a healthy practice, one I totally endorse. The idea of setting aside one day per week — the Sabbath — for mutual uplifting and compassionate spiritual reflection is crucial to the health of all human beings. There are lots of different ways to express your love and trust in God on the Sabbath. You can go to church or synagogue. You can visit someone who’s sick in hospital. You and a friend can go outside with a garbage bag and clean up your local parks and streets. You can have a family games afternoon — playing old fashioned board games like Monopoly or Scrabble. The single uniting factor in all these expressions of spirituality is relationship. You’re building positive relationships. You’re connecting to other people and to Nature. In creating these connections, you’re also creating a stronger connection with God the Mother and God the Father. You’re saying “yes” to life, love, service, and laughter. The last thing you’re trying to do is escape.

A: You’re trying to fully engage with life.

J: Yes. I taught engagement, not escape. This is why you see me in the Gospel of Mark as a man who doesn’t retreat into the wilderness, who rarely prays, who never worships in the Jerusalem Temple, and has no use for righteousness in the Law.

A: Yet Mark shows you living a life filled with faith, forgiveness, healing, and redemption. A life filled with relationships. Messy, complicated, frustrating relationships. But that’s what it means to be human, eh?

J: Worship and liturgy are two completely different things. Worship and faith are two completely different things. Worship is the “work” of pious people. Worship is the set of actions they undertake to achieve their long-term goal of escape. Orthodox Western Christians call this escape “salvation.” Buddhists call this escape “nirvana.” Atheists call this escape “saving lives.” At the core of these belief systems lies the intersection of status addiction, Materialism, and worship — the complete abandonment of God by human beings. I want to make it clear that I don’t mean God is doing the abandoning. I mean that human beings are doing the abandoning. I mean that every time a pious Christian devotes an hour or more each day to intercessory prayer, he or she is abandoning God. The more time a person spends in worshipful prayer each day, the farther he or she is getting from God. God doesn’t need your prayers or anyone else’s prayers in order to act. God is not bound by bizarre religious claims about Cause and Effect. God the Mother and God the Father have free will. They’re not chained to the rock. This means that you, as a human being, aren’t that important prayer-wise in the grand cosmological scheme of things. Contrary to the claims of many religious leaders, the sky will not fall down if the “chosen” nuns, monks, and mystics stop praying the Divine Office each day. (The theory here is that God needs to hear the recitation of the Mass and the Divine Office every day to help empower God in his great battle against the Devil to save human souls). Prayers of worship tell the God you’re trying to connect with that you don’t trust God. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot over and over again and then demanding to know why you’re lame.

A: Our prayers of worship may not be needed, but I know one thing for sure — our ability to love and forgive is sure needed.

J (nodding and smiling): God the Mother and God the Father don’t need or want our prayers of worship. AT ALL. On the other hand, they very much need our love. They want and need to be in relationship with us. We’re their children, and they’re just heartbroken, to be honest, when their own beloved children turn away from their divine family — their divine parents and their divine brothers and sisters. It’s very painful for God when human beings choose logic over love, mind over heart, and law over miracles and forgiveness. Some logic is needed, some mind is needed, and some law is needed. This should go without saying. But there has to be balance. And there has to be trust — trust in a loving, forgiving, amazingly brilliant but very humble God. This is what I was trying to teach.

A: It’s what I feel every day — a comforting sense of God’s loving presence, a comforting sense that I’m never alone. I get confused and upset about daily events like everyone else, but I know that at the end of each day God will be there to help me figure it out. I also know that when I screw up, God will help me recognize my mistakes, just as you’d expect mature, loving parents to do. They forgive me when I make a mistake, and they don’t hold any grudges. Their forgiveness helps me find the courage to learn from my mistakes, correct my mistakes, and move forward. Their forgiveness means I’m not caught in that horrible hamster wheel of shame, blame, regret, revenge, and self-loathing that I remember all too well from my earlier years. Their forgiveness has freed me to live.

J: Who needs escape on a future day when the miracle of forgiveness can free you today?

*For an introductory discussion of the role of status addiction in the orthodox Western Church see The Corruption of Free Will Through Addiction and Jesus: The Anti-Status Teacher.

Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", Buddhism, Cause & Effect, Church of today, forgiveness, free will, Gospel of Mark, Jesus Redux, Law (Nomos), life and death, Materialism, prayer, relationship with God, spiritual practices, status addiction, trust and tagged ethical mysticism, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

25 Mar 2011

JR27: Paul’s "Temple" versus Jesus’ "Kingdom"

“Jesus said: I stood in the midst of the world. I came to them in the flesh. I found all of them drunk. I found not one of them to be thirsty. My soul was saddened by the sons of men for they were mentally blind. They do not see that they have come into the world empty and they will go out of the world empty. But now they are drunk. When they sober up they will repent” (Gospel of Thomas 28). Photo of Komombo Temple, dedicated to Sobek and Horus, Aswan, Egypt. Author Dennis Jarvis. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

J: Today I’d like to talk about the starting place for understanding the many differences between what I taught and what Paul taught.

A: Sounds good to me.

J: I’ve mentioned before that Paul and I had different motivations, different purposes behind our respective religious movements. One of the few things we had in common was a strong sense of conviction. Paul believed in his cause, and was willing to argue for it. I believed in my cause, and was willing to argue for it. We both had strong opinions. We just didn’t have the same opinions.

A: Part of Paul’s cause involved arguing against your cause.

J: Definitely. Paul rejected — even feared — my teachings on the nature of the Kingdom. He was sure my Kingdom teachings would lead to anarchy. Widespread civil and social disobedience. His fears were shared by others.

A: Why was he so afraid?

J: Well, Paul, like so many others then and now, had allowed his brain to become focussed — riveted — on the perfection of Divine Law. Of course, he thought it was Divine Law he was giving all his time, energy, and devotion to, but really it was human law, human authority. He didn’t see it this way, though. He convinced himself that he was doing the right thing in aggressively attacking me because he was protecting Divine Law. He believed that Divine Law justified — gave sanction to — his actions.

A: Where have I heard that before?

J: Rigid, perfectionistic thinking is a symptom of imbalance and dysfunction in the wiring of the biological brain. It’s common in bullies throughout the world.

A: Paul spends a lot of time in his letters telling the people of his churches that they don’t need to follow Jewish laws on food and circumcision. If he believed so much in the law, why was he dissing it? It doesn’t make sense.

J: It makes perfect sense if you understand that Paul wasn’t trying to protect the “praxis” laws of regular Jewish people — laws about “petty little daily practices,” as he saw them. To him these minor practices were nothing, they were of no consequence. He wasn’t interested in the small stuff, the things that matter to regular people on a day to day basis. He was after the big stuff. The End Point. The Omega. The be all and end all. He was after the Power.

A: What power?

J: The power that he and many others close to him believed was woven into the fabric of Creation. The power to command the universal Law of Cause and Effect.

A: That sounds seriously creepy. And not even very Jewish.

J: Well, as we’ve talked about, there were different schools of religious and philosophical thought that used the sacred Hebrew texts, and these schools fought fiercely among themselves. In the 1st century CE, there was no agreement on what it meant to be a pious Jew, just as today there’s no agreement on what it means to be a pious Christian. Most people forget that there was a civil war among Jews in Judea in the 60’s CE. Sure, the Romans came in eventually and torched everything in Jerusalem. But before the Romans sent in their troops, the Jews were doing a fine hatchet job on themselves. This mood of dissension among Jews was already brewing when I was teaching and healing in Galilee. It’s part of the reason I left my home in Philadelphia (modern day Amman) and went to Galilee. There was a measure of religious sanity that still existed there.

A: The Bible claims that Paul was a Pharisee.

J: In Philippians Chapter 3, Paul is very clever about the claims he makes for himself. He says that according to Jewish laws of bloodline, he’s a member of the tribe of Benjamin. Big deal. Lots of people could make that claim. He says that according to prevailing Jewish customs around religious authority, he’s a Pharisee — a sort of rabbi/lawyer/teacher who deserves to be treated with respect for his religious knowledge. Then comes the clincher: he says that according to “zeal” (zelos in Greek) he was an early persecutor of the church and according to “righteousness” he was blameless in his actions against the church. When Paul talks about “zeal” and “righteousness,” he isn’t talking about “beliefs” or “opinions.” He isn’t saying he was just really enthusiastic or really committed. He’s saying he had “the zeal” inside of him. He’s saying he had a piece of Divine Law inside of him, a spark of God inside of him that was guiding him, commanding his thoughts and actions. He’s saying he was a “vessel of humility” into which God had poured the divine substance called “zeal.” Zeal is a kind of love, therefore — a love for the Law. Devotion to the Law. Obedience to the Law. Adoration, even, of the Law. It sees the Law as a quasi-divine being. Sort of an embodiment of the Divine desire for orderliness in Creation. More than just a philosophical structure. An animated, conscious entity, if you will. Wisdom — Sophia — was also envisioned in this way as a semi-divine female being.

A: Plato talked about the Laws in this kind of weird anthropomorphic way.

J: Yes. And so did the Essenes. The Essenes were very much a fringe cult within Judaism. They had the most highly developed mystical rituals, the most “out there” beliefs about God and Creation and occult magic. They were also highly devout, highly wealthy, and highly powerful. They were a scary bunch. And Paul was greatly influenced by Essene teachings about God, the Spirit, the indwelling Temple, and occult ritual.

A: Would you say that Paul was an Essene? An accepted member of the yahad?

J: No. He wasn’t teaching pure Essene thought. But he was influenced by their thought. He also had strong links to another important school of thought that’s harder to track.* He blended ideas from Essene thought and Hellenistic thought to create his “new and improved” version of the Law of Cause and Effect. By the time he began his “mission to the Gentiles,” he was no longer interested in mainstream Judaism, with its focus on Mosaic Law. He’d “moved up” on the spiritual ladder of ascent, on that ever so narrow and hard-to-find ladder of spiritual hierarchy. He’d found an enticing and intoxicating blend of occult magic and hidden knowledge — the kind of hidden knowledge reserved only for a few select apostles. He was drunk on the idea that this new knowledge would lead him to power — power over evil entities.

A: What evil entities?

J: The corrupted versions of Law and Wisdom and Life — their “evil twins.”

A: Their evil twins? This is sounding like some of the “contemporary horror” dramas that are so incredibly popular in books and movies and TV shows these days.

J: Same old, same old. It’s just a dysfunctional, distorted version of the Law of Cause and Effect when taken to occult extremes. It goes like this: “Well, if there’s a Perfect Law, a semi-divine being who brings only virtue and righteousness to people of virtue, then, logically speaking, there must be an evil twin of Perfect Law — a powerful semi-divine being who sows vice and corruption in the world.” It’s a nice, neat, simple mathematical formula to explain why evil exists. Sons of Light versus Sons of Darkness, as the Essenes clearly formulated it. What could be easier to understand?

A: It’s so easy to see what you’re saying by looking at Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Romans is filled with paranoid, dualistic, judgmental thinking. Paul tells people in gory detail how they can fight the evils of Law, Sin, and Death, and overcome these evil cosmic forces through the power of Christ’s name.

J: Yes. For Paul, Mosaic Law had become the evil twin of the pure Essene Temple Law. Sin was the evil twin of Wisdom (implying by analogy to Wisdom’s femaleness that Sin was also female). And Death was the evil twin of Life. Paul called this evil trinity Law, Sin, and Death.

A: On my God. That makes a ridiculous amount of sense. It explains how Paul could go around telling people they wouldn’t die if they believed in Christ — a promise that soon proved to be a lie, because some of Paul’s followers had already died, and he had to answer for it in his letters.

J: It’s popular these days for theologians to make excuses for this kind of apocalyptic promise, excuses based on the naive assumption that people in the 1st century CE “just didn’t know any better” and “can’t be blamed for believing in salvation from death.” This, I’m sad to say, is hogwash. No balanced, mentally healthy individual is going to accept the idea that human beings can escape physical death and continue to live for centuries on Planet Earth the way their mystical forebears supposedly had (e.g. Methuselah). It’s just goofy. It’s what Paul promised his followers in the beginning of his mission, but it’s goofy. In his Letter to the Romans, he has to go through huge theological contortions to try to salvage people’s belief in him. It’s a pretty sad way to go, if you think about it.

A: Promises, promises.

J: You know what works best in the Gospel of Mark? The fact that there are no “Cause and Effect” promises. Everything’s messy. Everything’s unpredictable. Shit happens, but so what? It can’t take away your courage or your faith or your trust in God or your desire to help other people. Even shit can be turned into very useful fertilizer.

A: So your Kingdom is about turning shit into fertilizer, and Paul’s Temple is about the quest to stop shitting at all?

J: And you say I have a way with words.

* For more on Paul’s true motives and affiliations, please see “The Peace Sequence” (Jesus Redux 38).

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Posted in Cause & Effect, Essenes, Favourite Posts, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), Materialism, occult themes, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Plato, spiritual ascent and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

23 Mar 2011

JR26: Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom

A:* For the last couple of days, ever since you introduced the idea that Pauline Christianity has always been in some ways a Materialist religion, my head has been spinning, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what you mean. I can feel that it’s right in the part of my self that’s intuitive, but the rest of my head hasn’t caught up to my intuition yet. So can we take it from the top?

J:* No problem.

A: How ’bout we start with some definitions? And by the way, I’d just like to comment once again on the fact that you’re a true philosophy geek, you know that? Your face lights up like a Christmas tree every time you get to talk about a juicy philosophical dilemma. I can sure see how you ended up being a radical theologian in your time.

J: I was a much more successful philosopher than I was a carpenter. Honest to God, although I had to work as a tradesman to pay for my room and board, I’m pretty sure some of my handiwork could have ended up on “Galilean DIY Disaster.”

A: Measure once, cut twice?

J: I’m not a natural when it comes to tools. I think like a designer, not like an engineer. I would flunk out of civil engineering, I’m sure of it. But redesigning the layout of a home so it supports a person’s soul needs — that I can do.

A: My father, the retired engineer and all-round handyman, would think you’re a wuss. But you’re so much like most of the other male physicians I know — great with healing, great with academic study, not so good with the toolkit. (For the record, my ex is a physician, and we socialized with other people who were in medicine. So I know — or rather, knew — a lot of the male physicians around here.) Anyway, back to the philosophizing.

J: Okay. Well, the philosophy of Materialism is based on the theory that matter — by that I mean baryonic matter — is the only thing that exists. It’s a WYSIWYG understanding of reality — what you see is what you get. What you see is atoms and molecules and measurable substances and Newtonian laws. Therefore, according to this theory, all things in Nature — including mind, thought, consciousness, even love — can be explained solely by looking at the small little parts that make up the whole. It’s the idea that macroscopic reality — the daily reality that human beings live and work and breathe in — is just a bigger version of the microscopic reality of atoms and molecules and gravitational forces, etc. Of course, as researchers in various scientific disciplines now know, there are huge gaps between the “macro” theories and the “micro” theories. At the subatomic or quantum level, the universe is a weird, weird place. At the other end of the scale — the cosmological or grand universal scale — the universe is also a weird, weird place. Only at the immediate level of reality, if I can call it that — the level where human beings happen to live a fairly safe and predictable Newtonian kind of life — only here is a Materialist philosophy even remotely justified.

A: How does Materialism understand God?

J: A person who embraces Materialist belief in the natural laws of “cause and effect” may or may not believe in the existence of God. Many, if not most, Materialists are atheists. Atheists, of course, believe that existence can be explained entirely on the basis of scientific research. No God is required. However, it’s entirely possible to be a religious Materialist, a Materialist who believes in God. Deism is a good example of this.

A: Deism is a belief system that says there’s a God, one God who created the universe, but that this God later stepped away from his Creation and doesn’t participate in an active way in our lives or our suffering. God is the Great Clockmaker who made a perfect timepiece and now lets it run without interference. However, there’s still an acceptance of the idea that God will reward virtue and punish vice in the afterlife. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson were all Deists . . . Tell me again why Deism isn’t the same as Pauline Christianity and Platonism?

J: It is Pauline/Platonic Christianity. Deism is what you get when you strip away later church doctrines about ritual and sacraments and prayer to saints (intercession) and belief in Marianism and belief in holy relics and belief in holy Crusade and belief in papal infallibility. Deism is Pauline thought in its purest form — a belief in the inviolability and perfection of Divine Law. Divine Law that governs “cause and effect” in the material world.

A: But Paul goes on and on in Romans about the inherent peril of “the law,” how knowledge of the law led him into sin.

J: Paul isn’t attacking all Law. He’s attacking the laws he no longer agrees with. Paul spends all his time in his letters talking about the “new and improved” Law — the Law that he himself is teaching. The New Covenant. It’s easy to forget that Covenant is Law — nomos in the Greek. Nomos was a complex idea that included both human authority and divine authority. When Paul talks about the “new covenant,” he’s talking about a new version of Divine Law. A new version of the Law of Cause and Effect. “If you do this (believe in Christ), then according to the inviolable Law of Creation, you must receive this (salvation plus a reserved parking spot in Heaven).” It’s a reductionist philosophy. Just as Materialism is a reductionist philosophy. Everything is reduced to a simple “cause and effect” formula.

“They asked him: When is the Kingdom coming?He replied: It is not coming in an easily observable manner. People will not be saying,’Look, it’s over here’ or ‘Look, it’s over there.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is already spread out on the earth, and people aren’t aware of it” (Gospel of Thomas 113). Each autumn, this walnut tree yields its harvest to those among God’s creatures who need it most. They receive these gifts without any reliance on human prayers or covenants. There’s wonderful freedom in trusting God to do what God does best when you don’t take on the burden of believing you’re somehow responsible for maintaining the laws of Creation. Photo credit JAT 2014.

A: Just as Wisdom teachings in the Ancient Near East were a “cause and effect” formula: if you obey the instructions on the “virtue lists” and disavow the behaviours on the “vice lists,” God is required to reward you because the Law says so.

J: Paul, clever manipulator that he was, observed that there was a “niche market” of people who’d become disillusioned with the certainty of Wisdom teachings. Obviously there was something missing from the formula if slaves were still slaves and women were still being punished for being women. The Hellenistic cities of the Roman Empire were filled to bursting with resentful slaves and restless, intelligent women. Who better to target if you’re planning to launch a new religious movement? Slaves with money and women with money. You don’t need to slog through the trenches and carry out years and years of missionary work — you just need to get yourself some patrons with deep pockets. Paul doesn’t even deny his reliance on patrons.

A: One staggering fact that jumps out in the Gospel of Mark is the fact that you have no patron. Nor do you seem to want one. This would have shocked readers in 1st century CE Roman-held regions.

J: Part of my objective was to refuse to “play by the rules.”

A: In the end, so many of these religious debates and religious conflicts boil down to “the rules” — the law, the covenant, the nomos. But all these rules . . . they’re external. They come from outside the inner self. They pretend to be objective. They pretend to be based on observable realities from nature. Yet enforcement of them relies on brute force, on rote memory, and on loyalty to patrons or other important religious/political leaders . . . at least I think that’s right. Is that right?

J: Yes. The one thing Paul doesn’t want is for people to know how to tap into their own inner wisdom, their own inner guidance. He doesn’t want them to know how to hear God’s quiet voice in the still, clear night. He doesn’t want his “community of fellowship” to find actual freedom. He only wants them to believe they have freedom (exousia) through the proper use of conscience (suneidesis). He wants them to be willing slaves. Slaves who won’t rock the boat of authority.

A: This is really sick, you know that?

J: Of course it is. There’s a reason these teachings have spontaneously led to generation after generation of abuses — abuses against the poor, the environment, against other Christians, not to mention countless non-Christians. Also abuses against God. These abuses are the “weeds” that have grown from the “seeds” that Paul intentionally planted.

A: Is this why Paul never mentions healing miracles in the letters he himself wrote?

J: Yes. Paul can’t afford to have his community of hagiasmos and koinonia (holiness and fellowship) distracted by the idea that God is deeply committed to ongoing healing, communication, and relationship with all people through the Kingdom within. The Kingdom within, of course, is the core self — the soul. The good soul. That’s how God connects with all God’s children — through the good soul that everybody is. God can and does communicate by other means, too, but the one connection that can never be taken away is the soul connection. You can cut out somebody’s eyes so they can’t see any more signs (and, unfortunately, this has been done). You can cut out somebody’s ears so they can’t hear any more external messages. You can cut out somebody’s tongue so they can no longer speak the prayers they long to sing aloud. All these abuses have been perpetrated “in the name of God” at one time or another. But nobody can cut out the connection to the soul. You’d have to carve out the entire brain and central nervous system of a person in order to fully quench the soul connection, the body-soul nexus. Obviously this would lead to death.

A: Hey! It’s another thing to add to the Jesus’ Seminar’s pot for the question of “Why Jesus Pissed People Off So Much That He Got Himself Crucified.”

J: Paul works very hard to ensure that his followers believe in a Kingdom that’s on the outside — “out there” in the Materialist world of cause and effect. “Out there” where they have no control over any of it themselves. Even more brilliant, Paul insists the Kingdom of God isn’t here yet. It belongs to some maybe-not-so-distant Day of Judgment. So not only is the Kingdom a materialistic reality outside the self, but it hasn’t even “arrived” yet. [1 Corinthians 15]. This prompts regular people to be thinking about the future instead of the present. This encourages them to shift their focus, their attention, and even their relationships to the future. To the future “effects” of today’s “causes.” People are so busy worrying about the future that they can’t hear God’s voice today.

A: Therefore they can’t hear the guidance they long for.

J: The guidance they want and need.

A: I like your version of the Kingdom teachings much better.

* If you’re new to this site, A=Author and J=Jesus

+71

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Cause & Effect, Gospel of Mark, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), Materialism, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, quantum theory, slavery, Soul and tagged Kingdom teachings, science & faith | Leave a Comment

06 Mar 2011

JR18: The "Trilemma"

A: This morning it seemed like a good idea for me to post part of the cognate paper I wrote for my Master’s degree. I’ve included the abstract, the information from the Schematic Model that underlies my argument, and an introduction to the argument itself. This paper has not been published, but, like all original writing, is covered by copyright laws.

This research paper was the product of years of combined academic and mystical research. I got a lot of help from Jesus (though I couldn’t put that in the bibliography!), and I got little help from my supervising professor, who was somewhat bewildered by the paper. The paper was read and marked by a second professor — P.H., a theologian of Pentecostal stripe — who hated the paper and who, strangely enough, accused me of wasting 20 pages in the middle on “nothing” and then in the next breath accused me of not backing up my stated theory about Jesus’ teachings. She literally could not see, with her fundamentalist background, that the “wasted pages” constituted an analysis of radical claims about Jesus made by the author of the Gospel of Mark. People see what they want to see, even in academia.

July 18, 2012: Today I posted the research paper in its entirety. You can access it on the “Doctrines of the Soul” page I’ve added to this site. Enjoy!

ABSTRACT:

This paper compares different theological claims that were made about the soul in Hellenistic philosophy, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christianity, and shows through the use of a new theoretical model that these claims cannot be grouped by religion. Doctrinal claims about the soul can instead be grouped into one of three main fields of theological inquiry: the physis versus nomos debate; the nomos versus the Divine debate; or the physis versus the Divine debate. These three debates have operated in parallel within Christianity since its inception. The Gospel of Mark provides evidence that Jesus’ own teachings on the soul may have been part of a novel solution to the physis-Divine debate. By contrast, Tertullian’s detailed doctrine of the soul, presented in The Soul’s Testimony and A Treatise on the Soul, draws on the traditions of the nomos-Divine debate, and yields very different claims than those presented in Mark. Tertullian’s doctrine of the soul, and his related doctrine of original sin, have exerted great influence on the orthodox Christian understanding of the soul. The church today has the option of reexamining the history of early Christian soul doctrines and assessing the three parallel strands of thought to uncover a previously overlooked biblically-based understanding of the soul that can meet today’s pastoral needs.

Schematic Model for the Theological “Trilemma”:

1. The Rift Between PHYSIS and NOMOS The Problem: How can we reconcile the necessities of nature with the themes of justice and judgment derived from human laws? The Solution: Elevation of human authority and human status (arete). IN TENSION WITH 2 AND 3.

2. The Rift Between NOMOS and the DIVINE The Problem: How can we reconcile the themes of justice and judgment derived from human laws with the puzzling long-term relationship we have with God? The Solution: Elevation of prophetic authority, and lack of accountability to the necessities of nature. IN TENSION WITH 1 AND 3.

3. The Rift Between PHYSIS and the DIVINE The Problem: How can we reconcile the necessities of nature with the puzzling long-term relationship we have with God? The Solution: Elevation of secret knowledge, mysticism, and cult rituals. IN TENSION WITH 1 AND 2.

The model I propose is shown in diagrammatic format in figure 1, Schematic Model for the Theological “Trilemma.” This figure is elaborated on in tables 1, 2, and 3. Although a much longer paper would be needed to examine this model in detail, in the current paper I will use this model to examine three major streams of theological thought that have all, in their own way, used doctrines of the soul to resolve issues of religious and political authority. By placing the different doctrines of the soul mentioned above into this framework, it is easier to see in what way Tertullian’s theology differs markedly from that of Jesus in the Synoptics. The contrast between these two demonstrates clearly that doctrines of the soul do not line up neatly according to the respective religious tradition from which each emerged. In other words, there is not a soul doctrine that is unique to Judaism, a different soul doctrine that is unique to Hellenism, and a third one found only in Christianity. Instead, a distinctive three-fold pattern exists, a pattern that is shared among Judaism, Greek religion/ philosophy, and early Christianity, and this three-fold pattern is the basis of the model I am proposing. This three-fold pattern, or “trilemma” as I have chosen to call it, partly explains the “why” of fierce theological debate. It also helps explain why we are so confused today about the nature of the soul.

The pattern I am proposing as a theological framework to help us analyse our current confusion arose in response to observations made by Walter Burkert in his book Greek Religion. Towards the end of this important book, Burkert discusses the religious and philosophical crisis that erupted in the fifth century BCE when sophists and atheists undermined Greek religious certainty with their observations about nomos and physis:

Nomos, meaning both custom and law, becomes a central concept of sophistic thought. Laws are made by men and can be altered arbitrarily. And what is tradition if not the sum of such ordinances? Horizons are extended through travel and the reports of travel: with growing interest men became aware of foreign peoples among whom everything is different, witness the ethnographic digressions of Herodotus. In this way the unquestioned assumptions of custom can easily be shaken. The discovery of the changeability of custom becomes particularly dangerous when nomos is set in opposition to physis, a concept provided by the philosophy of nature where it is used to denote the growing of the cosmos and of all things contained in it from their own laws. Archelaos, a pupil of Anaxagoras, is supposed to have been the first to formulate this antithesis about 440 BC: the just and the unjust, the ugly and the beautiful are not defined by physis but by nomos, by arbitrarily changing human convention.

But it was on tradition, nomos, that religion primarily rested, as the Greeks knew well. Its foundations were seen to be threatened, at least in theory, as a result of the questioning of nomos.[1]

Burkert then goes on to outline how pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Sophocles, and Diogenes of Apollonia “delivered” the pious from this crisis of uncertainty by asserting that “[t]here are laws of eusebeia which are rooted in heaven, removed from human caprice, and eternal like the cosmos itself.”[2] Thus, concludes Burkert, “nature speculation provides a starting-point from which to close the rift between physis and nomos, and so to give a new, unshakeable foundation for piety.”[3]

“The rift between physis and nomos” is a phrase so powerful, so meaningful, that it seems almost paradigmatic, and Burkert’s recognition of the pattern opened the door to a pursuit by this author of other such paradigmatic rifts. This line of enquiry led to the observation that there seem to be two other major rifts: the rift between nomos and the Divine, and the rift between physis and the Divine. Each of these rifts is not a simple duality but rather a complex philosophical/theological tension that encompasses perennial questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a human in relationship with God.

The three-fold pattern I suggest here can be represented by the triangle shown in figure 1. Each point of the triangle represents one of the three rifts. Although other writers have proposed three-point triangles to highlight both doctrinal and scholarly incongruities[4], what distinguishes the “trilemma” from other three-point models is the fact that each point in the proposed triangular scheme represents not a single concept but a complex tension between two difficult-to-reconcile concepts that seem to be separated by a rift. Each of these rifts, on its own, represents a valid question. For instance, it is perfectly valid for religious seekers to ask in what way human laws and traditions should (or could) align with the laws of nature (nomos in tension with physis; table 1); or in what way religious laws are (or could be) made in the image of our relationship with God (nomos in tension with the Divine; table 2)[5]; or in what way the actual laws of nature reflect our relationship with a God who allows death and suffering (physis in tension with the Divine; table 3). These are all straightforward and important themes of theology. What is not straightforward is the way in which the answers to these questions gradually resulted in three divergent theological solutions, as shown on tables 1, 2, and 3. Each of these three theological solutions presents a different view of who God is, and how we can be in relationship with God. These solutions are mutually incompatible. For instance, if you “cut and paste” the three different versions of how God is perceived in these three different solutions (that is, if you try to put them all together on one point in the centre of the triangle), you arrive at a God who is simultaneously distant and transcendent, fully immanent, unchanging, emotionally detached, interventionist, emotionally involved, in conditional relationship with us, in unconditional relationship with us, and proleptically in relationship with us. This simply cannot be, unless one resorts to the time-honoured tradition of explaining away overt contradictions as mysterion.[6]

What emerges upon examination of the “trilemma” is the extent to which these three theological solutions are mutually incompatible. The questions that underlie the three points are not incompatible; but the solutions that have arisen and been accepted as dogma over many centuries are very much incompatible. A person who attempts to hold all three solutions together as a unified whole is likely to end up confused at the very least. Yet for centuries Christians have been trying to do this very thing. Before that, the people of Judah/Israel and the people of classical Greece wrestled with the same confusion. This is not a new problem. But until we recognize it as a reality that is causing us problems, and until we look for new ways to de-complicate our Protestant theology, we will continue to be confused about our relationship with God.

This same confusion manifests in our current understanding of the soul, which, as I will show in the next two chapters, presents a theological solution based on only one point of the trilemma – the nomos-Divine rift – while using a confusing blend of vocabulary that seems to point to the other two points as well. Thus we will see the emergence of a soul doctrine that means one thing while ostensibly saying another. The intent of this soul doctrine is to entrench the inviolability of divine contract laws (the nomos-Divine rift), but it refers often to the language of free will (physis–nomos rift) and of mystery (physis-Divine rift). In this context, it is little wonder that today’s church is so reticent about the soul – at present, the orthodox understanding of the soul makes no sense!

[1] Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (1977; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 312-313.

[2] Ibid., 318.

[3] Ibid.

[4]Dr. W. M. pointed out to his Winter 2009 class the triangular models of Mattitiahu Tsevat and James Barr respectively. Tsevat’s model shows the doctrinal dilemma of the Book of Job, which can be summarized as “just Creator, just persons, just rewards: pick two.” Mattitiahu Tsevat, “The Meaning of the Book of Job,” Hebrew Union College Annual 37 (1966), 73-106. James Barr presents a threefold process for studying the Bible – referential, intentional, and poetic – in The Bible in the Modern World (London: S.C.M. Press, 1973), 61. James Rives, however, comes closest to the model I’m suggesting when he describes the three kinds of advantage offered by religion in the Greco-Roman period: (1) traditional benefits, (2) intensification, and (3) salvation. James. B. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 168-179.

[5]As the entry on nomos in the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology points out, “[t]he legal, ethical and religious meanings of nomos are inseparable in antiquity, for all goods were believed to come from the gods, who upheld order in the universe and in relations between men . . . . Philosophy (even that of the Sophists), kept alive the awareness that, since human laws are so fallible, man cannot exist unless he conforms to cosmic, universal law . . . . Whereas the Sophists criticized the idea of absolute validity attaching to nomos, Plato and Aristotle each in his own way connected it with the nous, the human spirit, and thereby once again with the divine.” Hans-Helmut Esser, “Law, Custom, Elements,” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 2, rev. ed., ed. Colin Brown (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986),439.

[6]Although I am a practising mystic, I would not want to fall back on the excuse of mysterion to try to force these different images onto a single page. Mystery as a concept can be dangerous when used as a catchall to smooth over doctrinal inconveniences or to uphold church authority at the expense of the oppressed. The church needs mystery – but it does not need the kind that has been used to justify longstanding abuses in the church towards women and the disadvantaged.

Posted in Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Law (Nomos), Mark vs Paul, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

22 Feb 2011

JR14: Crimes of Religious Passion

A: I have a confession to make. I was looking back at some earlier posts, and I realize that both you and I were guilty of using the terms “light” and “dark” in a less precise way than we might have. So first I want to apologize if we confused anybody.

J: Language is fluid. Communication is fluid. Words like “light” and “dark” have a lot of different meanings, depending on the context. This is why I say the intent is more important than the words. The goal here is not to speak or write like a corporate lawyer, but to talk about feelings and ideas related to the spiritual journey. Writing “live” on a blog has some of the same problems as being interviewed live on TV. People will look for ways to trip you up. But that’s their choice. That’s their intent. If their intent is to be legalistic for their own benefit, that’s up to them. Small errors in speech are going to happen, and each individual has to decide how to react to those errors. It’s a choice like any other choice.

A: It’s a choice to look at the intent behind the words or actions.

“Jesus said: What you will hear in your ear, in the inner ear proclaim from your rooftops. For no one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, nor does one put it in a hidden place. Rather, one puts it on a stand so that all who come and go will see its light” (Gospel of Thomas 33 a-b). In this saying, the act of lighting a lamp shows both your intent and the consequences of that intent. No matter how hard you try, and no matter how many excuses you invent, you can’t hide your actual intent from either your inner self (your inner ear) or from God. Your actual intent shines as brightly as a lamp to those who have the emotional maturity to see it. So it’s best to be honest about your intent and start trying to fix your mistakes in a responsible way (instead of blaming other people or blaming God or Satan for what you yourself chose to do). The photo above is a graphic reminder for me about the steps involved in taking personality responsibility. In the “oops, I made a mistake” department, I forgot to check the old back shed before the start of winter and failed to notice the hole chewed by a family of rodents so they could bring in a pantry-full of seed-filled cones. Cleaning up after the mistake I made wasn’t fun, but one of the important spiritual practices is learning how to be honest with yourself about your own mistakes and then figuring out how best to clean up after yourself. God is always happy to help you with this spiritual task. Photo credit JAT 2016.

J: Yes. People make mistakes. It’s part of the human condition. Everybody makes mistakes. But not all mistakes are made with intent. Many mistakes are nothing more than accidents — pure accidents, with no intent to harm. Sometimes the results of purely accidental mistakes can be tragic. More often than not, though, the greatest harm is caused by people who have harmful intent towards others. Among adolescents and adults, the majority of mistakes carry with them a harmful intent. A young child who drops a glass of milk because his motor skills aren’t fully developed has no harmful intent. An adult who gets behind the wheel of a car after drinking may not be planning to crash into another car — so from this point of view a crash is an “accident” — but his intent is clearly harmful from the moment he gets behind the wheel. He intends — he chooses — to drive regardless of the consequences to himself or anyone else. That’s what I mean by a mistake with harmful intent.

A: He made a choice and hoped he wouldn’t get caught.

J: The body of law known as common law understands this principle. You treat a crime done “on purpose” differently than you treat an accidental harm. You look at the intent of the people involved, and ask yourself if anybody had motive. Did anybody stand to gain?

A: Can acquisition of status can be considered a motive, an incentive, a measurable and desirable gain in the eyes of some individuals?

J: Acquisition of status lies behind many a crime.

A: Including religious crimes against humanity — the ones committed by status-seeking religious leaders?

J: Especially the crimes of religious passion. Especially those.

Posted in conscience & morality, honesty, intent, Jesus Redux, Law (Nomos), Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, psychopathy, status addiction and tagged The Peace Sequence | Leave a Comment

13 Feb 2011

JR9: Jesus Explains "The Kingdom"

A: You told me several years ago that you wrote parts of the Letter of James yourself — specifically James 1:2-27, James 2:1-8, and James 3:1-18 — and that after your death your older brother James added the remaining verses to blunt the effect of your writings and make them more “pious.” Yesterday I was checking something in the Letter of James, and I couldn’t help smiling. What you wrote 2,000 years ago sounds an awful lot like what you said for the record last Wednesday. Do you mind if I put in a quote from James?

J: Knock yourself out.

A: Okay. Here’s the NRSV translation of James 2:1-8a, with a couple of changes in emphasis. Here goes:

“My brothers, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in God? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please,’ while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there,’ or ‘Sit at my feet,’ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and becomes judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'”

J: You give them one little inviolable spiritual law to follow, and they argue with you until you’re blue in the face and dead in the ground. It’s 2,000 years since I said that, and a huge number of Christians still don’t get it — you can’t love your neighbour and keep your status addiction, too. You have to make a choice.

A: There are almost no Christians who believe you wrote these verses yourself. Few theologians pay attention to the Letter of James. It doesn’t have any real “Christology” in it. To them, it’s little more than a typical 1st century wisdom sermon. Martin Luther hated this letter because it seems to deny Paul’s doctrine of “justification by faith.” Luther called it “an epistle of straw,” and would have had it removed from the Protestant canon if he could have.

J: There you go. More proof for the theory that Paul and I had very different things to say about God.

A: Tell me what you meant when you described the poor as “heirs of the kingdom.”

J: That goes to the heart of my teachings.

A: I know.

J (grinning): No point beating around the bush, eh?

A: Exactly my thought.

J: Well, I guess you could say that I was trying to be a good teacher. By that I mean I was doing my best to explain complex ideas in a useful, useable way. Good teaching often involves finding the right image, the right metaphor for the group you’re teaching. The right metaphor can open up doors in a student’s mind, help her find the connection between what she already knows and what she’s learning. You can try to invent new terms, new words for a complex idea. Scholars often do this. Or you can try to work with existing vocabulary and use it in new ways. I opted for the latter.

A: So you chose the word “kingdom” because of the symbolism attached to it at the time.

J: Well, here’s where it gets confusing. The word “kingdom” by itself was not the exact image I chose — not that word by itself, anyway. But, like all people, I was sometimes guilty of shortening things for the sake of convenience. The actual phrase I chose was “basileia ton ouranon” — Koine Greek for “kingdom of the heavens.” Eventually, when I was speaking or writing for my own community, I called it “the kingdom” for short. But by then it was understood what I meant.

A: Which was . . . ?

J: I was trying to express the idea that each individual person should think of themselves as a whole and complete entity, lacking nothing as far as God was concerned. A tiny kingdom of “selfhood” unto themselves. An inviolable kingdom. A worthy kingdom. A very small kingdom, to be sure, but one they had full rights over as its “sovereign.” It’s about boundary issues, really. Today’s teachers and psychologists use the phrase “boundary issues.” I used the phrase “kingdom of the heavens.” But it’s the same idea exactly. It’s the idea that your body and your mind and your heart belong to nobody but you. Therefore, it’s wrong to transgress those boundaries. It’s wrong for you to invade somebody else’s body, mind, and heart, just as it’s wrong for them to invade yours. It’s about human dignity, human worth. It’s about seeing each individual as, well, as . . .

A: As an individual?

J: Yes. It’s about seeing each individual as an individual, instead of seeing them as property or as a means to an end.

A: Status addicts. Psychopaths. Narcissists. People suffering from these disorders can’t see other people as they really are — as other people. They tend to see them as objects to be used.

J: That ideal — if you can call it that — was ingrained in the culture of my time. People were so used to hearing about “the chosen” and “the judged” in society that they weren’t questioning the wrongness of it. They had little mental framework, little understanding of the idea that slavery was a violation of the soul. Most of the people I worked with in my ministry felt like the proverbial dog who’s been kicked. The dog is at the bottom of a long list of people kicking each other according to rank. The dog has the least rank, so he gets kicked the hardest. That’s the mentality I was facing in Galilee.

A: You were facing an uphill battle trying to persuade your students that they were worthy of God’s love and forgiveness — just as worthy as the priests in Jerusalem.

J: It’s not easy to overcome the conditioning of a lifetime. They weren’t inclined to believe me. These were people of faith. They didn’t want to anger God. They wanted to show God their obedience and faith. They were suspicious of me for a long time.

A: What turned the tide?

J: In the end, it was about trust and compassion, I guess you could say. I stuck to my guns. I did what I said I would do. I wasn’t a hypocrite — that alone earned me a lot of trust. I treated people fairly and respectfully the way I thought God wanted me to. Stuff happened.

A: Stuff happened? Like what stuff? What happened?

J: Oh, you know. Healings. Changes. Stuff like that.

A: You mean like healing miracles? That kind of stuff?

J: Well, yes, if you want to get right down to it, I suppose you could describe it that way.

A: Healing miracles began to take place, and the people around you — the poor and disadvantaged of Galilee — began to notice.

J (nodding yes): [Nods without speaking]

A: Were you the source of the healing miracles? Did you yourself heal them?

J: No. Never. No human being has that kind of power, that kind of ability. Healing miracles, when they take place, come from God. Only from God and God’s healing angels. I was only a facilitator, if you will. A human being people could see and touch with their own senses. My job was to reassure them, comfort them, encourage them to trust. The actual healing was God’s work. And I said so. Loudly. As often as I could. I never claimed to be a chosen prophet, and I yelled at anybody who tried to call me the Messiah. I clearly understood that my role — my task as a human being who’d been given many advantages during my youth — was to help people feel okay about receiving God’s love and comfort and healing. If I was helpful in my role as a physician — suggesting teas and salves and other sorts of medical treatments — it was only because God was guiding me in my work. I listened carefully to what God’s healing angels were saying (that’s where it’s handy to be a practising mystic), and I did what they suggested to me. I wasn’t being “forced” to listen to my angels. I wanted to listen to my angels, and I wanted to trust their advice. That was my choice — my own free will. They’re damned smart, and they had some wonderful healing suggestions.

A: Can you give any examples of their advice?

J: Gosh. They had tons of medical insights. Things like, “Tell that woman she has to eat orange vegetables.” Of course, they knew — although I didn’t — that orange vegetables contain Vitamin A, important for normal vision. Two thousand years ago, that was a miracle. They warned me, as well, about the dangers of lead. Lead was used in those days in many practical ways because of its low melting point and malleability. “Stay away from food vessels or utensils made of lead or pewter,” they said. Good advice, that.

A: And pewtersmiths have stopped making pewter with lead.

“A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed in the country; and people came to him from every quarter” (Mark 1: 40 – 45). Photo credit JAT 2016.

J: The most important thing my angels taught me, however, was to ignore the standard Temple teachings about illness and healing. To be honest, my angels had nothing nice to say about traditional purity laws. They told me it was okay — by that I mean medically safe — to ignore the “do not touch” laws about skin diseases, bodily fluids, and dietary restrictions. My angels said to me, “Touch, touch!” So I touched. I looked in people’s eyes when they were sick. I held their hands. I told them their angels were with them. I told them God was with them. Any physician worth his or her salt will know what this means to a frightened patient. The relationship between physician and patient is integral to the healing process.

A: So you took the healing process away from the designated Jerusalem priests and put it into the hands of God. You made the healing process both more scientific and more compassionate. Which somehow led to more miracles.

J (nodding yes): Um hum.

A: I can just imagine how furious the priests would have been that people were getting better from eating carrots instead of from giving sacrifices at the Temple.

J: The fact that I was descended from priests on my mother’s side didn’t help the situation any.

A: They must have been very upset when they started to hear rumours about your healing ministry — a son of priests performing unsanctioned healings outside the Temple precincts.

J: That would be an understatement.

Posted in boundary issues, ethical mysticism, faith, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), Letter of James, slavery, Soul, status addiction, trust and tagged historical Jesus, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

18 Jan 2011

TBM6: Why This Is NOT Gnosticism (Gnostics Need Not Apply)

I was raised in a household where respect for the law was paramount. We were expected to obey a whole host of rules and guidelines for civil living. My paternal grandmother, who lived in close promixity to us, was exceedingly formal. I have no memories of sitting on her lap and reading a cozy children’s book, but I have many memories of her correcting my grammar and my table manners.

Grandma believed in education and she believed in hard work. She also believed firmly in the advancement of women’s rights. (Not bad for a woman born in 1899). She read the politics and business sections of the newspaper each day. She kept a tight rein on immediate family members.

All her life, my grandmother was a devout Anglican. The form and function of the Anglican church in Canada shaped many of her attitudes. One of these attitudes was her attitude towards God. She was raised to believe she was a lowly human being unworthy of close relationship with God. She would have been shocked — shaken to her core — to hear me speak of having a close and kind and loving relationship with God. To her, this would have been blasphemy. Hubris. An outrageous and presumptuous claim. To her way of thinking, the only possible — the only correct — way for a person to be in right relationship with God was to uphold the values of law: duty, honour, and obedience. She was a true Victorian matriarch in a post-Victorian age.

Grandma had a “top down” understanding of God, faith, and the soul (which is what the Anglican church had taught her), and she viewed duty, honour, and obedience as the only viable defences against the breakdown of civil society. She trusted reason, and greatly distrusted sentimentality, since the latter could only lead to weakness and impoverished will. Rigorous application of reason and respect for the law would in turn breed the required self discipline and personal responsibility so necessary to a person’s adult life.

Or so she thought.

She was right about the need for self discipline and personal responsibility. Unfortunately, she was completely and utterly wrong about the method for guiding the development of self discipline and personal responsibility in a growing child.

Spiritual teachers of great renown, regardless of their faith tradition, usually agree on one universal feature of the spiritual path: the need for self discipline. Many traditional spiritual practices that have evolved over the centuries have one main goal — the goal of teaching self discipline among disciples and adherents. Meditation and fasting are frequently cited as key methods for building and enhancing self discipline in religious seekers. If this works for you, then by all means stick with it. But you probably won’t find this site helpful to you.

This is because I recommend an altogether different way for people on the Spiral Path to gradually restore the sense of self discipline and personal responsibility they were born with.

I recommend a path of healing the damaged parts of the biological brain that are interfering with your ability to live a life filled with purpose, gratitude, and meaningful relationships.

I recommend this approach — in contrast to the traditional approaches of rigid spiritual practice — because it’s my contention that if you work to achieve balance and healing in your life, if you choose emotional integration and ongoing learning in your daily life, one of the by-products of this pursuit will be a growing inner core of trust in your own self discipline and your own commitment to personal responsibility. You’ll discover, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, that you’ve been walking along the Road without realizing you’ve been wearing the “the truth” the whole time. You just have to get to the point where you can recognize that truth for yourself.

What am I saying? I’m saying (contrary to the teachings of most spiritual teachers) that you won’t succeed in staying on the Spiral Path if you try to impose self discipline on yourself from the outside by engaging in strict, mechanistic, often obsessive religious rituals or practices. I’m saying you have to start from the inside. You have to start with your very own soul.

This part of what I’m teaching is non-negotiable. Everything I’ve learned from my angels and from the soul who once lived as Jesus is based on a doctrine of the soul that’s positive, that’s uplifting, that’s holistic, AND THAT’S
NOT GNOSTIC.

(I hope my inclusion of some very large letters will persuade you that I mean it when I say the doctrine of the soul I’m teaching is NOT Gnostic in any way, shape, or form.)

If you prefer a spiritual path where (1) you’re not asked to believe at all in the existence of the soul, or (2) where you can let yourself off the hook by believing in Gnostic teachings about the soul, then I invite you to look elsewhere. I have nothing to teach you if you choose to believe you’re a lost widget in a vast, uncaring universe, or (even worse) if you choose to believe you’re a “spark of the Divine” trapped in an evil body as part of a great cosmological battle between good and evil (i.e. Gnosticism).

How Gnostics see the world. Photo (c) JAT 2014

How a Gnostic sees the world. Photo (c) JAT 2014

There’s no point looking for God’s love in your life if you’re determined at every turn to reject your identity as a loving child of God. You may as well go out and join a secular charity devoted to good causes. It’s useful and worthwhile and important to society.

But it ain’t no spiritual path.

You’re either on the Spiral Path with all your heart and all your mind and all your courage and all your soul, or you’re not on it at all. You may be somewhere, but it’s not the Spiral Path.

Fish or cut bait, as my son’s Maritime relatives would say.

Either throw yourself into the idea that you have a soul and that it’s a good soul, or take up a new hobby that demands less courage.

It’s all I’m asking of you — that you believe in a loving God and that you believe you’re a loving child of God (aka “a soul”).

How a cataphatic nature mystic sees the world. Photo (c) JAT 2014

Yes, I know it’s a lot to ask of you. I’m not asking anything of you that wasn’t asked of me. We’re all in this together, and we need each other’s insights.

In other words, it’s pretty much a Twelve Step Programme for the human brain.

That’s why I think the Serenity Prayer is so terrific.

Posted in building your intuition, cataphatic mysticism, Gnosticism, gratitude, healing, humbleness, Law (Nomos), My Spiral Path, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, relationship with God, Soul, The Blonde Mystic, trust and tagged building your intuition, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

25 Jun 2010

CC21: The Law of Attraction in the Gospel of Matthew: God as the Great Gumball Machine in the Sky

Ya gotta love those Kevin Trudeau infomercials. The guy’s a regular pitbull when he’s trying to market his latest “no-fail” product. A while back, he was aggressively promoting his “Natural Cure.” These days, he’s hawking “the Law of Attraction” in a new and improved form that can be yours in a 10 CD package for a mere $297. He calls his latest course “Your Wish Is Your Command.”

Not long ago, Rhonda Byrne was selling essentially the same product through her book and video called The Secret. Before that, Joseph Murray was touting the “newly discovered” Law of Attraction in books such as The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. And before that, Ernest Holmes was proclaiming the wonders of “the Law” in his “landmark” book The Science of Mind.

What has this got to do with Christianity?

Everything.

The Law of Attraction, as recent writers have labelled it, is not a new idea. It’s an ancient idea. It’s an idea that serves as the foundation for a lot of ancient religious writings that are loosely lumped together by scholars under the heading of “Wisdom Literature.” Wisdom teachings purport to teach people how to recognize the inviolable laws of creation that, if properly observed, can lead to wealth, prosperity, good health, family status, and happiness.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, three books are generally considered to represent the Wisdom tradition: Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Elements of Wisdom teachings are also sprinkled here and there throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, as in Genesis 2-3. Some of the Psalms have overtones of Wisdom.

Not to be outdone, the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament states in unambiguous terms that if you follow the laws and the prophets in righteousness, “all things will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33). In his wrap-up to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew has Jesus say, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11).

There you have it in a nutshell. All you have to do is ask in the right way, and God will give it to you. Not only does God want to give it to you, but God has to give it to you, because the contract law says so. The contract law between God and God’s people is binding on God. So if you righteously obey all the divine contract provisions (as they are stated by your religion’s prophets), well, naturally, God is required to hold up his end of the bargain, and give you everything you ask for — wealth, health, and happiness.

There’s a special kind of law that governs all Creation, you see. As several religious traditions will tell you, including Western Christian orthodoxy, these laws are both highly secret and highly powerful. If you can uncover the hidden secrets of these laws, you can tap into their unlimited power. In this spiritual understanding (which, I’d like to emphasize, is not limited to any one religion) God’s divine creativity is considered to be a tap. It’s hard to find this sacred tap, and it’s even harder to figure out how to turn it on. But once you have the secret knowledge (gnosis) of how to turn on the tap, you can get whatever you want.

Mystics of all religious traditions frequently fall into the narcissistic mire of believing that (1) there is such a tap and (2) they alone know how to find and control said tap. These same mystics are usually delighted to share the information with their disciples for a price. Sometimes, as with people such as Kevin Trudeau, the price is mere money. More often, the mystic seeks to gather for him/herself a treasure considered even more valuable to a narcissist than wealth. That treasure is status.

The religious leaders of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) thought they had the Law of Attraction all figured out. It didn’t turn out too well for them. Photo credit 675px-Moái_de_Rano_Raraku,_en_Isla_de_Pascua, Wikimedia Commons.

A dysfunctional mystic can live quite comfortably as an ascetic, disdaining wealth, comfort, and personal possessions, as long as he or she receives a steady diet of status to feed an ongoing psychological state of status addiction — an addiction to status, as opposed to an addiction to psychotropic substances. The addiction to status operates in a person’s central nervous system like any other addiction. There are constant cravings. Getting a “hit” of status causes the brain to release dopamine in the same way that getting a “hit” of cocaine causes the brain to release dopamine.

The only way for an ascetic mystic to get an ongoing supply of status is to indulge in spiritual practices that “affirm” to the mystic that he or she is higher on the ladder of spiritual ascent than you are.

To be higher on the ladder is to have more status. It’s as simple as that. It’s as scary as that.

To be “in the know” about the “Law of Attraction” is to have more status. This ancient spiritual practice attracts psychologically dysfunctional people who are already addicted to the dopamine high of status. That’s why it feels so good to them when they try to follow these “righteous” teachings — they’re getting a hit of dopamine each time they tell themselves they’re cleverly invoking the “contract laws” of the universe (i.e. invoking the Covenant).

Be careful what you wish for — you might get it, and it probably won’t be what you thought it would be.

That’s because God the Mother and God the Father never give you what you ask for. They only give you what you need.

And you need an addiction to status like you need a hole in the head.

+10

-4

Posted in A.N.E. Wisdom literature, Bible, Book of Genesis, Cause & Effect, Concinnate Christianity, Law (Nomos), Materialism, Matthew's and Luke's intent, mysticism, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged Wisdom literature | Leave a Comment

23 May 2010

CC14: Why I Think Jesus Was A Physician-Scholar

Among Progressive Christians in Canada these days there’s a popular new trend in church reform. This is the “Jesus-is-obsolete” trend.

Well-known authors such as Gretta Vosper and Tom Harpur, along with less well known but influential biblical scholars such as William Arnal (plus my own New Testament professor), have concluded that even if we could figure out who the historical Jesus was with some degree of accuracy, it wouldn’t matter to the church today. According to these authors, if Jesus has any remaining importance to us in the third millennium, it’s only in a symbolic way. In other words, the symbol of Jesus is more important than the reality of Jesus. Our acceptance of this reality will help the church move forward, say these authors. Tom Harpur is so convinced of this that he no longer believes a real individual called Jesus of Nazareth even existed. For him, Jesus the Pagan Christ was an entirely fictitious character from the get-go.*

I guess you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I don’t agree with these authors or my New Testament professor.

Limestone ossuaries were used in Jewish burials in Palestine for a fairly limited period of time just before and after the start of the Common Era, so they’re a useful archeological tool for gathering information about Palestinian Jewish families from the late Second Temple period. This one, with a common motif of rosettes, was found in Jerusalem and is dated to the Herodian Period. (It’s on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017) If you want to know more about this topic, you can read my post called “Excavating James: The James Ossuary and the Talpiot Tomb” at https://jenniferthomas.ca/?p=603

On the other hand, I wouldn’t dispute the level of confusion and disagreement among scholars of the historical Jesus. These are the researchers who use historical, archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic data to try to piece together the facts of Jesus’ life — things like his actual date of birth, his actual date of death, the identity of his family members. They’re looking for information from verifiable sources outside the Bible to try to make sense of the conflicting biblical accounts of who Jesus was. This “Quest for the Historical Jesus” has been going on since the time of the Enlightenment, so it’s not new. Albert Schweitzer was so frustrated by the whole process that he gave up on theology and went off to Africa to be a doctor. (There’s a certain irony in this, as I’ll show.)

A couple of years ago I stumbled across a really cool website called “Historical Jesus Theories,” put together by Peter Kirby (www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html). On the first page, you can see at a glance how much disagreement exists among scholars of the historical Jesus. You can see that scholars have studied the “facts” about Jesus, and have concluded that Jesus is best described as “Jesus the Myth: Heavenly Christ.” But wait! There are also 8 more theories! There’s the theory of Jesus the Myth: Man of the Indefinite Past — Jesus the Hellenistic Hero — Jesus the Revolutionary — Jesus the Wisdom Sage (a popular one) — Jesus the Man of the Spirit — Jesus the Prophet of Social Change — Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet (also a popular one) — and last but not least, Jesus the Saviour.

Wow. All those theories based on the facts, and not a single one that suggests Jesus was a physician-scholar. It’s my own thesis that Jesus is best understood as a physician-scholar, so I can’t suggest any books for you to read on this theory because as far as I can tell there aren’t any books (apart from the one I’m writing).

I also think Jesus was a practising mystic, but secondarily to his role as a physician-scholar. (If you think I ruffled a few feathers in my theology classes with my theory that Jesus was a physician-scholar, you should have seen my Christology professor’s eyes almost pop out of her head when I suggested in a class discussion that Jesus had been a mystic!)

I have to admit I’m somewhat puzzled about the resistance to this idea that Jesus was a physician-scholar. To be frank, this understanding of Jesus fits much better with historical and psychological realities than any of the other theories. It fits like a hand in a glove when you read the Gospel of Mark. When you read only what Mark says, and you try to completely ignore what the other gospels say, you have a story about a guy whose priorities are healing the sick, forgiving people, teaching people, spending lots of time with people (even when they make him slightly exasperated), and trusting God.

Right near the beginning of Mark, Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17). Today’s commentators seem to want to interpret this allegorically: they say that Jesus wasn’t actually a physician, but was more like a healer of the soul for those who had sinned. So when Jesus self-identifies with the role of medical practitioner, it’s okay for Christians to ignore it. But when other people who don’t even like or trust Jesus call him “the carpenter” in Mark 6:3, that’s not allegorical — that’s factual! Jesus is a poor, illiterate carpenter! Jesus is a poor, illiterate, Jewish, Aramaic-speaking carpenter who probably couldn’t speak Greek! Jesus is a poor, illiterate, uneducated, Aramaic-speaking carpenter from the Galilee who obtained his amazing ability to engage in sophisticated debate with scribes and Pharisees because . . . well, because the Spirit had chosen him! And, to prove this fact, we can easily see that the history of Christianity has been similarly shaped only by men who imitated Jesus in his illiteracy, who were all were poor, uneducated tradespeople, fluent only in their local dialect, and unable to use the tools of rhetoric to argue their case except when the Spirit moved them! Yes! History and psychology prove that Jesus must be seen in this light! Why, all of Christianity’s thinkers fit this model!

Don’t they?

What . . . you mean you think that history and psychology prove the opposite — that the great religious thinkers who’ve been remembered for centuries (regardless of their respective religious traditions) have — to a person — been highly educated and charismatic but emotionally humble? Like, oh, like maybe Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or the Dalai Lama. These men are from our own era, yet it’s pretty hard to imagine that any of them could have made a difference if they hadn’t used their personal charisma and advanced education in service to the people they love(d).

Do we have to imagine that Jesus was a carpenter and only a carpenter? (Not that I have anything personal against carpenters. My own father is a tekton in every sense of the Koine Greek word, and has always spent his spare time building and repairing things in his workshop — but my father is also one of the smartest people I know, and he earned a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering in the 1940’s. The fact that he’s an amateur carpenter doesn’t negate his other training.)

There are many other clues in Mark that together build a portrait of Jesus as an educated physician-scholar. (I won’t go into all of them in this post, or this post would end up as long as a book chapter.)

I’ve wondered from time to time whether today’s scholars can’t “see” Jesus in this light because they’re thinking of “physicians” through their own hermeneutical lens. Let’s face it — modern Western medicine of the allopathic variety is not doing much these days to impress people with its compassionate bedside manner. This is especially true if you live in the United States, where health care decisions are increasingly being made by for-profit insurance companies. If your own personal experience has led you to equate physicians with cold-hearted, scientifically-based, profit-oriented medical care, then you’re probably not going to be looking for Jesus to be a physician. In fact, you probably wouldn’t want Jesus to be a physician, because then you wouldn’t be able to relate to him anymore.

This is where it’s important to step back and apply the criterion of “historical context” to Mark’s picture of Jesus as a physician-scholar. Jesus lived in a time when healing and religion were intertwined in a way we don’t fully relate to in this era of modern medicine. So when Jesus is quoted in Mark 2:17 as saying that sinners are in need of a physician, he means that both medically and religiously. Mark is giving readers the clue they needed in the first century CE to understand what claims he is making about Jesus’ training and background. It would have been obvious to readers then that Mark’s Jesus was a physician-scholar. It also would have shocked many pious people, because according to the “righteous” (who also make an appearance in Mark 2:17) only priests sanctioned by the Temple had the power and the right to heal the sick.

Mark’s Jesus is a rogue healer. He doesn’t follow any of the Laws when he does his healing, either Jewish laws or Greco-Roman laws. This is why I call Jesus a founding member of Doctors Without Borders. He put the suffering of the sick ahead of the Law.

Only those who’ve had a doctor fight for them or their loved ones against today’s institutional medical bureaucracy and conventional scientific wisdom will understand what courage it took for Jesus to do this.

Thanks be to God.

For a scholarly update on some of the early non-biblical sources that talk about Jesus or imply his historical existence, please the article by Dr. Lawrence Mykytiuk called “Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible” in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

For more on Jesus’ approach to healing, please see “Spit-Wives and Dead Goats.” For introductory exegetical commentary on healings in the Gospel of Mark, please see The Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Posted in Concinnate Christianity, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Law (Nomos), Paul and tagged Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

18 May 2010

CC12: Update on "the Sin Within"

Yesterday, the Globe and Mail published an AP story by Nicole Winfield (May 16, 2010, updated on May 17) entitled, “Thousands Flock to Vatican to Back Pope Over Abuse.”

At the Vatican. Photo credit J MacDonald 2011.

According to the report, approximately 150,000 people showed up in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, May 16, in a spontaneous show of support for Pope Benedict XVI. Banners had been hung in the colonnade, including a banner that said, “Don’t be afraid, Jesus won out over evil.”

The article quotes the Pope as saying, “The true enemy to fear and to fight against is sin, the spiritual evil that unfortunately sometimes infects even members of the church.”

The mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, was among the faithful in the Square. Alemanno told AP journalists that “we want to show our solidarity to the pope and transmit the message that single individuals make mistakes but institutions, faith and religion cannot be questioned.”

Meanwhile, on the home front here in Canada, the Roman Catholic Primate of Canada, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, is in hot water because he was “simply stating church doctrine” when he told a reporter that it’s always morally wrong for a woman to have an abortion, even in cases where the woman has been raped (Nelson Wyatt, “Statement From Catholic Cardinal About Abortion and Rape Causes Uproar,” The Globe and Mail, May 18, 2010).

Notice here that church doctrines — the formal belief statements touted by the church as “truth” — are being placed on a pedestal. The doctrines themselves are sacred. Sacrosanct. Holy. They act as a divine shield against that horrible cosmic power called “sin” or “the Devil.” Unfortunately, individual people sometimes get attacked by evil despite the protective power of these doctrines. Therefore, the faithful must redouble their efforts to obey the moral laws contained within the doctrines, says the Church. In other words, it’s all right to challenge the actions of individual abusers, but it’s not all right to challenge the doctrines that contribute to the creation of these abusers. Even when the doctrines violate all common sense and all common humanity, the doctrines are right and you are wrong.

These Christian leaders show us that they are cowards. They lack the courage to trust in God, they lack the courage to take responsibility for the historical errors of church doctrine, and they lack the courage to make meaningful changes.

I see no evidence in their teachings or in their behaviour that they actually believe in a loving God. However, I see plenty of evidence that they believe in a God who loves some children more than “he” loves others (i.e. election), who is too stupid and too weak to prevent cosmic sin from entering Creation, who thinks it’s okay to hold a major grudge-fest for all eternity against one man and one woman who made a mistake (i.e. Adam and Eve), who is required to follow all the laws and doctrines that male church leaders have dictated to God over the centuries, who is going to have a really big yard sale one day in the future to clear out all the unwanted garbage (that garbage might be you, according to the church’s teachings about Judgment Day!), and who is so touchy and narcissistic and sensitive to an attack on “his” sense of honour that he couldn’t stand the thought of fixing the sinful world alone, and had to send in a pinch-hitter (Jesus) to save “Team Humanity” from that wily guy who’s pitching for the other side.

Does this sound like the kind of God you want to get close to? Because this is the God that fills the pages of orthodox Western Christian theology. This is the portrait of God that “cannot be questioned.” This is the portrait of God that cowards like to hide behind.

Not every church leader is a coward, and not every Christian is a coward. These days, individuals from all religious traditions are challenging the teachings of their conservative leaders, and are asking daring questions about God. Some of these people are so distressed by the narcissistic intransigence of their own conservative religious leaders that they’re leaving the church and seeking spiritual solace in other ways.

Please ask all the questions you can. Only through our honest questions and honest answers can the church of the third millennium heal the sense of “brokenness” that many writers have described.

Please help find a way to invite God the Mother and God the Father into our hearts and our lives. Our beloved Mother and Father are nothing like the fickle, judgmental, authoritarian dude described above. Jesus knew this. I’ve had the privilege to come to know this. I invite you to know this, too. God loves all their children.

Even you.