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Inerrancy

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When I began taking flute lessons again at 50, my teacher kept on insisting that I needed to record my practice sessions. I understood why: I was substituting speed for clarity and precision. The notes came out in a blur that began and ended on the right notes, but that didn’t communicate anything in the middle.

But the thing is that I conditioned myself to that expectation of velocity, and I’ve stuck with it, slowly eliminating the extraneous motion and learning to focus the air flow. I’m beginning to sound like a flautist.

This was particularly apparent today after I came back from Dance Tribe in Santa Barbara. I felt like playing dirges, and since I don’t have any in sheet music, I just played slowly. I was pleasantly surprised by the clarity of tone.

I’ve been calling patiently to Hillary all week, and resolved to dance this morning for healing. While waiting for the doors to open, I offered Out of Eden’s Every Move I Make and the Katina’s Draw Me Close. I got part way through Sheena Wellington’s The Christ Child’s Lullaby before cutting inadvertently over to Lauren Daigle’s I Am Yours. Fifteen minutes of tears later, I realized that I could have taken another path: Shiva’s Dance of Destruction. But I held my resolve, and spent most of the first hour of the dance working my way in to the root of the pain. When it was over, I thought “You know, Hillary, your pain is a link to the things that beset us.” I walked out into the sunlight, and made them present to the Ancient of Days.

Yes, that is an intentional reference to Daniel 10.

I am hardly proud of all this trauma. Particularly because much of it originates in Christian confusion – this idea that we are “one nation under God,” which means that the Bible should be the moral law of the land.

I finally heard an interviewee on NPR explain the Evangelical premise: Christian faith requires conversion of the heart, and a belief in the inerrancy of God’s word. Politically, that departs from the ten commandments, headlined by “thou shalt not kill,” and continues through pro-life logic to a determination to see the Supreme Court recomposed to overturn Roe v. Wade. It was that determination that caused almost all white evangelicals to vote for Donald Trump.

I could tell them that they are wrong – wrong all down the line. Jesus reminds us that God “desire[s] mercy, not sacrifice.” He commands us to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” As promised in Jeremiah, Jesus dethrones the law, eliding it to “Love God and your neighbor.”

Why does he do this? Because the Law is not God’s word. Read the covenant with Noah: “By man shall man be judged.” The whole of the Pentateuch is a lesson in natural consequences – that threatening people doesn’t lead them to do good, it just corrupts those that mete out punishment. It’s not God’s Law, it’s man’s law propagated under the authority granted by God. This is why Jesus casts the law aside.

Look even at “Thou shalt not kill.” What does that mean? Only people, or does it also include other forms of life? And what about the capital punishments of Leviticus, or the genocide of Deuteronomy? The only conclusion to be drawn from the progression is that human priorities were present in the Law from the beginning.

So why was the Law allowed to persist? Because it served the purpose of building the capacity to reason in God’s chosen people. That fragile tool allows us to overcome our animal instincts, discerning and strengthening creative behaviors.

Jesus came when enough people were prepared to recognize the lesson delivered by the law of natural consequences – the religious and political practices of his era were a terrible abuse of faith. The people’s hunger for truth and justice caused many to accept the invitation to “follow.”

So what about our world today? There are still those that need the discipline of reason, and should they chose to follow some version of the Bible’s ethical code, that’s good for them. But there are also those that envision bringing a child into this world, and dread the prospect that that child will live a life twisted by fear and want, or casually crushed by violence. They know what it’s done to their lives, and they can’t imagine that anyone would want to repeat that experience. And then we have those that wish to have a child, but want to do it under the right circumstances, when all the benefits of family and community can be at their disposal as they grow.

None of us are inerrant. Even Jesus protested “Why do you call me ‘Master’? There is only one that is good.” We all make mistakes, and those mistakes cause us pain. Love is the tool that heals us of the consequences of our mistakes. Jesus tells us to love God because it calls that healing power closer to us. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors because that allows God to see them clearly, and so to heal them most effectively.

The soul of the aborted child will find a loving family capable of providing for its security and growth. Is that not what it would desire?

Maybe, then, we should think of the “Word of God” in the way the John invoked it: the logos that was and is with God. The source of all creative power, the force that amplifies all that is good. Simply and wholly: Love. In its infinite possibilities, love overwhelms any law of human reason. It leads people through error into repentance, and thus to wisdom. It prepares them to do better next time, rather than denying them the right to try at all.

From this perspective, all the dross of human vanity and folly falls away from Scripture. It reads as Jesus characterized it: the effort of a loving “daddy” to guide his children into maturity.

We shouldn’t be in such a hurry to write perfect laws, for love undoes the strictures of government. It is an error to chain it to law, for when the Kingdom arrives, government will fall away. We will all have the benefit of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and so no law except the song of compassion in our hearts.

Hillary: Next Steps

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The fundamental problem with Bernie Sanders’ socialist agenda is that governments do not respond to the needs of individuals. In delivering services, they must categorize people and compartmentalize society.

I think that Hillary and I agree that the suffering of the American middle class demonstrates that reality. Prior to the neoconservative takeover of the Republican Party, the middle class financed college education by paying itself 7% interest for loans against deposits that earned 6% interest. The deregulation of the Savings and Loan industry under Reagan was the beginning of a long tilt of the playing field, under the auspices of government, against the middle class in favor of the economic elite. This extended not only to the financial services industry, but also to the CEOs that run Main Street, men and women that dilute our pension plans by awarding each other enormous stock options packages.

Where Sanders sought to lead a messianic revolt against the system that threatens to throw the baby out with the bath water, Clinton proposed a more modest program of adjustment. Sanders, with his unfounded charges of corruption against both Clinton and the DNC, validated Trump’s campaign rhetoric. He has as much to do with the loss as anyone, and for him to claim the mantle of the progressive movement is hypocritical in the extreme.

So the electoral and political system is broken. We’re going to have to solve our problems ourselves. As a Christian, I see it this way: the idol of the federal government has been cast down. We can no longer seek security through claims of justice against the public purse. We must rely upon the compassion of others.

Love is the only path forward.

So where does this leave the candidate that I still honor? Well, finally able to focus her full powers on charitable work. Hillary, take the Clinton Global Initiative into Detroit and Flint and Cleveland. Side-step the broken federal system, and bind people together, face-to-face, hand-to-hand, in the glorious promise of healing that transcends geographical, political and national boundaries.

I am certain that Christ will join you there.

Getting Over Our Ages-Old Fear of Old Age

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I came across this delightful image today in David Stipp’s Scientific American short on anti-aging supplements. He says:

Whenever I see my 10-year-old daughter brimming over with so much energy that she jumps up in the middle of supper to run around the table, I think to myself, “those young mitochondria.”

Stipp’s article leads me to the conclusion that the recent fad for mitochondrial supplements seems to be undermined by evidence that systemic factors dominate. Specifically, our youthful vigor is not restored by supplements that improve the efficiency of the mitochondria that transfer energy from sugar to our muscles. That means other factors are at work.

My advice for those that can’t wait to be young again: enjoy this life, and don’t fight death when it comes. It’s your opportunity to be reborn with a full set of new equipment.

The Anti-Anti Christ

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I’ve been laid up with crippling muscle tightness for the last two days, spending most of my time lying on the floor and trying to stretch the inside of my thighs. I guess that no respectable masseuse will work there, so I had no idea how tight my adductors had become. Sunday night after Dance Tribe in Santa Barbara, I got out of the car and almost couldn’t stand up. My foam roller doesn’t have any instructions for that area, but I ended up laying on my side with the inside of my thigh on top of the roller, wiggling the muscle back and forth across its length, working my way between the knee and my groin. It wasn’t quite like the black-out pain that I used to get doing Bikram’s half locust posture, but it was close.

Yesterday I went in to work to push a customer release forward, but at two the pain forced me home. I spent the rest of the day watching movies between sets on the foam roller and trying to get back into cow pose. I caught the last half of Stigmata on Sunday night, and picked up the ending of The Vatican Tapes yesterday. The two movies captivated me, not necessarily because they were compelling, but because they characterize two of the central difficulties I have faced as I attempt to go about the work that I do in the world.

The dramatic tension in Stigmata revolves around the attempt by a Catholic cardinal to suppress knowledge of Jesus’ authentic teachings. This builds around a fragment of the Gospel of Thomas:

Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone and you will find me.

This is consistent with the teachings of the four canonical gospels that the kingdom of God does not reside in institutional order, but is found by looking into our own hearts. That the Church is threatened by this teaching is evident from its conduct, but there are many explanations. One is that, as Jesus taught:

It is not what goes into your body that defiles you; you are defiled by what comes from your heart.

[NLT Mark 7:15]

To tell a sinner to look into his heart is to bear responsibility for the consequences of his struggle with sin.

This is a struggle, naturally, to which priests are not immune. Stigmata relates the experience of the saints that suffered from the stigmata – bleeding from the wrists and feet that reflects the depth of the spiritual bond to the cross.  The more nearly they approach to that perfect expression of love, the more they are beset by demonic influences seeking to enter into that power to work their will in the world. I would counsel any so beset to trust in love, and to do as Jesus did: offer your enemies forgiveness and a promise of healing. But what most stigmatics hold in their heart is a fear of sin, and it is that fear that runs amok as they draw to them the “demonic” spirits that seek healing.

Witnessing that struggle, many of their peers take refuge in religious institution. The institution becomes a substitute for Christ, and eventually of greater value to those that maintain it. This is not merely a point of theology: I was told as a child that a contemporary pope was torn from the throne of St. Peter because he was about to announce the return of Christ.

The Vatican Tapes explores the second great challenge to the return of Christ. This is the common teaching, drawn from the Book of Revelation, that Christ will be preceded by the Anti-Christ – a figure that manifests all of his virtues for the purpose of corrupting Christ’s purpose.

Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all; and by the signs that it is allowed to perform on behalf of the beast, it deceives the inhabitants of earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived.

[NSRV Rev. 13:11-14]

This echoes the words of 2 Thessalonians:

The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders, and every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

[2 Thess. 2:7-9]

The interpretation by many is that the Anti-Christ is a man that will beguile the trusting with spiritual gifts, and lead them into corruption. In The Vatican Tapes, that ‘man’ is actually a woman, perhaps uniting both the anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon in a single figure.

The problem posed by this interpretation is that it leads us to mistrust the presence of Christ among us. Christ brought fire down from heaven – the flames of the Holy Spirit. If we experience that, might we fear that we are being deceived as predicted in Revelation? And Jesus was famously a wonder-worker. Following Thessalonians, would a man that came to perform similar wonders be recognized as an avatar, or condemned (as Jesus was by his contemporaries) as a false messiah?

The way out of this trap is to recognize that Christ is not the man Jesus: Christ is part of the triune God that was, is and will be. Just so is the Anti-Christ: an opposition to Christ that since the dawn of life here on Earth has struggled against the healing power of divine love. Just as Christ’s influence reaches out from the cross through the ages, so the anti-Christ has woven its thread through our history. In the Bible, it can be identified as the serpent in the Garden, Herod on his throne, and the dragon in Revelation that chases the holy mother into hiding.

The only true barometer that distinguishes these two is our heart. Christ demands nothing of us but that our heart be filled with his love for others. Anti-Christ beguiles us with personal gifts that are twisted to command our fealty. Christ leads us because we trust him; Anti-Christ rules our thoughts with pleasures that cannot be sustained.

Here is the measure of goodness: not in what it offers us, but in the joy that it awakens through the boons received by those we cherish. Here science affirms that we are made in God’s image: if given a gift, our happiness lasts longer if we use it to benefit others.

This should be familiar to many of my readers. What may not be familiar is the allocation of spiritual gifts. This is the greater wonder, in my mind, and something tells me that it is an experience that others should now be encouraged to attempt.

Prior to Dance Tribe on Sunday, I stopped down the street at Hope. The pastor was just beginning his teaching, the concluding lesson in a series titled “A Freight Train Called Desire.” The lesson “The Loco-Motive” explored the damage we do to ourselves in seeking approval from others. I could feel a recognition in the congregation; they all knew this frustration. With that experience established in their minds, the pastor then reminded them that only one trustworthy source of approval exists: that of Jesus’ Abba (Daddy), the one that loves us without conditions, who welcomes our repentance with honor no matter how prodigal our sins.

In these moments prepared by a gifted teacher, I feel the congregants lifting their minds and hearts to the heavens. I am moved, recognizing the integrity of their desire, to guide it to the heavens with my hands, reaching up and up until I feel the angels’ responsive awareness. There is always a moment of surprise at this sense of being among the angels, and we pause there. As on Sunday there was nothing but gratitude in the experience, I raised my hands again to call them down.

Then comes the hard part: all the sorrows of this world come to the fore. Sometimes this is a defensive act – an attempt to protect ourselves from dissolving into love. But more often it is an act of healing. What comes to the fore are the experiences that must be surrendered if we are to hold on to the grace of the angels. So on Sunday, I found myself rooted to my chair as the tears rolled down my cheeks, heart breaking for the suffering of those I sat amidst.

Finally it cleared, just as the pastor completed his message. I don’t remember his closing prayer, for he had called the worship team up to lead the final song of praise. All the hours of practice focused in that moment. Sitting behind the rest of the congregation, I lifted my hands, imagining the stage cupped in my fingers, focusing the angelic presence. The introductory instrumental meditation resolved as a harmonic line, and the female lead sang directly into our hearts:

Oh, how He loves us, oh.
Oh how He loves us, how He loves us all.

Dave Crowder Band, How He Loves

It is an experience that I absolutely do not control. It is a relationship between angels and the congregation. It is something they do together when both see the possibility of service to love: us in manifesting healing in the broken world, the angels in amplifying God’s presence among us.

I am simply the witness to that possibility.

So I beseech you: open your minds and hearts to those possibilities. Do not allow fear to corrupt your love: have faith in Christ, immerse yourself in that security, and know that no power can stand against the strength of the healing we bring to the world with his angels. His love is the anti-anti-Christ. It erases the power of the anti-Christ. It makes the anti-Christ a lost, forlorn and confused figure – a withered shadow from our past that dissolves into the future we are creating together.

The Serpent’s Usurpation

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In reflecting on my spiritual work here, I try to honor my unique perspective in relating my experience to others. In considering how to relate recent events, I keep on coming back to St. Perpetua, the early Christian martyr who surrendered her newborn and was mauled by lions in the forum before impaling herself on a sword held by the centurion sent to administer the coup de grace. Before her martyrdom, she was granted a vision of a field filled with bronze ladders. Men and women climbing those ladders towards heaven were dragged down by a serpent below.

After writing Love Works back in 2005, I visited a number of spiritual book stores, looking for venues to talk about the work. One of the stores had opened recently, and I was the sole attendee at an event held by a spiritualist. She took a good look at me, and shared that I had a four inch gap in the flow of prana between my hips and rib cage. When she asked if she should fix it, I said “that’s the business of a woman that I haven’t met yet.” I considered that it was a useful characteristic, in that it kept people from using sex to get into my heart and mind.

Of course, it has its negative impacts as well. I have trouble grounding myself psychologically, a weakness that has been exploited over the years by domineering intimates both in my personal and professional lives.

Having become conscious of the problem, I did try to manage it. My first attempt was to close the loop by routing the healing energy arising in my heart upwards through the crown chakra and then down into the earth before closing the loop up into my root chakra.

I first gleaned the sense that the gap was not entirely self-induced at the Buddhist Geeks’ Retreat in Rosemead in 2009. The kick-off speaker on Friday night spoke on the characteristics of the avatar that would usher in the era of peace foretold by all the world’s great religious. He cited compassion, all-embracing meditative focus, and out-of-the-box thinking. Hoping that I had finally encountered someone that might appreciate my experience, I went up after the talk to offer my insights. Upon receiving my assurance that the time was close, he looked up at the outside of my head and affirmed “I can see that it must be so” before turning his back to address a question.

On Sunday morning, having found their event to have been somewhat co-opted by my presence, from among that senior teachers an attractive little pixie stood forward to denounce me, saying that “my energy was completely out of control.” I won’t recount the rest of the conversation, because what was significant was my strong intuition that she was interested in managing my purpose. In the middle of her harangue, she leaned forward with desire in her eyes and wrapped her arms around a band of energy that cocooned my lower torso, a band centered on the gap seen by the spiritualist.

Something was pinching off the flow.

I first confronted this presence back in 2014 when – during a Dance of Liberation Workshop led by Parashakti at LA Ecstatic Dance – I tunneled down into my reptilian brain. In the vision that followed, I walked through the spiritual dislocation of the dinosaurs that culminated with a vision of their avatar sitting in the seats of military and political power in the modern era, feasting on the constructive energy generated by human compassion.

That survey of the human condition was not directly related to my personal infestation. The connection was only made recently, after Peter at Peace Place Massage had worked on me one Saturday night. Where Asia, my regular therapist, has a distinctly feminine healing touch, Peter just stirred things up. I went home that night and laid with my arms stretched across the bed and my heart open to the sky. Seized by a strong intuition, I found myself rubbing my hands down along my ribs, wriggling them under the spiritual bands around my waist, and sending energy along my fingers into the tissues of my abdomen.

Since that experience three months ago, I’ve been fighting tension and pain in my waist. Stretching and yoga helped, but I felt as though I was just chasing the problem from place to place. To a colleague at work, I actually used the words “things are really moving around.” I was focused on the pain and tightness, but the words expressed an important intuition.

We’ve suffered a lot of dislocation at work, and my supervisor has come under intense scrutiny as engineer after engineer disappears on short notice. He adopts an unusual posture in conversation with others, feet spread wide on the floor. I have a strong sense of energy flowing up into his pelvic floor. We continue to have our arguments, and as we discuss the consequences of decisions made in the past on the survival of the company, I find it hard to avoid bringing up ancient history. My association with him seems to drive me into remembered experiences of weakness in his presence.

In the midst of these two struggles, I was listening to praise music one night, a series of songs from WOW Worship that encouraged the faithful to surrender their hearts to God. A vision came upon me, a masculine presence that focused my attention to my pelvic floor with the words “You need to find my throne.” In response to that, I began poking at the base of the hip bone with my fingertips, until a point begin to glow.

This event was followed by a series of visualizations in yoga, visualizations centering myself around my pelvic floor, and building power around the point that I had discovered. This came to a head last night. I had a unsettling series of experience yesterday, either of co-workers claiming initiative on projects that I had instigated, or attempting to make me responsible for bringing closure to projects that I had heretofore been pointedly excluded from. I have been struggling to sleep at night due to the pain in my abdomen, and I was knocked off-balance psychologically.

Yoga was a struggle. Throughout the opening standing series, I felt weak, off-balance and beset by negative psychic energies. As we entered the balancing poses, I sharpened my focus to identify specific personalities, and tried to ground myself in my root chakra. Reversing the flow of energy leaking into them, I began to build power in the postures, with a new-found focus on the pelvic floor. Finally, in balancing stick pose, I arrayed them around me, one at my fingertips, one at my toes, and one on either side of my hip. They attempted to wriggle away, shifting and substituting others, but I just kept on pulling them back, using them as anchors for the pose.

The rest of the practice was a breeze.

But the spiritual and psychological shift was more significant. All of the personalities that I engaged are domineering. I have previously identified one in particular as “the tip of the spear” for the whole pattern of control that we struggle with as a society. As we wrestled spiritually, I had a strong image of him sitting on a throne, a throne nestled in my hips. Pushing him aside, I focused on the throne itself, and discovered a kaleidoscope of personalities shifting on it, until finally I broke through and discovered the dragon that rules them all.

Tech Anti-Experience

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Jon Evans at TechCrunch offers an analysis of the value of experience in software development. My reply:

From the time that the electric motor was offered as a flexible method for distributing mechanical power, it was nearly 40 years before belt-driven machines were replaced. According to historians, the controlling factor was establishing a community of technologists that understood how to leverage that flexibility.
Information technology has upended this constraint. Differentiating technologies are created and distributed to self-organizing tribes that use their specialization to gain competitive advantage over established peers in months.
This is fed by the industry’s rock-star economics: nobody knows where the next Apple or Facebook or Twitter is going to arise, so they find the most exploitable source of labor (young men with raging hormones) and set them to churning out code on unreasonable schedules.
The more thoughtful among “experienced” developers might look at the proliferation of technologies and draw parallels to youth counter-culture and slang in society at large. That would be to ignore the mature centers of the industry that serve to continuously remove impediments to the creation of distributed solutions. Younger developers have fewer things to think about – at least until the infrastructure begins to creak under the burden of their unanticipated success. Today, cloud-based SaaS and PaaS is eroding even that bulwark for experience.
So the author is correct, although maybe for the wrong reasons. My fear is that the real reasons also erode the value of the advice in the last two paragraphs. With the disruption of the “old boy’s network” by the world-wide-web, trying to keep up with technology may be a fool’s errand.

God’s Bargain

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One of the charms of Democracy is the barren privilege of our belief that we can bargain with an incredibly powerful being – our government – that knows almost nothing about us. We have a vote, and we hang on the words of candidates, hoping to hear a promise that we can bind with our vote. Those that draw upon other resources (whether the free market or faith) to garner security tend to wish to limit the role of government. Those looking at success from the outside often wish to draw upon governmental power to avert personal calamity. In most of the electorate, those two impulses join in incoherent combination. Witness, for example, the Floridian retiree who pronounces that entitlements must be cut to reduce the federal deficit, but insists that Medicare and Social Security are sacrosanct.

Entitlements for the elderly were established as a “New Deal” during the Great Depression. At that time, the elderly were the most impoverished segment of society. Since that time, the elderly have become the wealthiest segment of the population, being replaced on the lowest tier by our children.

The challenge of loving people unconditionally – of saying that you will invest in the survival of others without regards to merit – is to create conditions in which the loved ones may choose to use their power to hurt themselves and others. In our modern democracy, the elderly – the community with the most time for political organization – have used that opportunity to steal power from those without a political voice – children. That hasn’t happened directly, and any specific senior citizen would be angered by my characterization. But governments are aggregates, and my statement, in aggregate, is irrefutable.

The Bible, of course, is the story of Unconditional Love’s attempt to enter into and glorify the world. It celebrates episodes of human grace, but for the most part it is a record of iniquity – of the rejection of unconditional love in favor of material possessions (land, wealth or political alliance) that provide security. Inevitably, the strategies of material possession create competition between individuals and communities, often culminating in violence.

How does God deal with this problem? Well, in the Old Testament, generally by disassembling the nation. In the record we have Noah’s Flood, the subjugation of Egypt, the culling of the Golden Calf, the jealous threats of Exodus and the exile to Babylon. So we have this paradox: the gifts of Unconditional Love are showered on the people, but when they abuse them, they suffer terrible punishment.

Unfortunately, the power of this rebuke was projected onto individuals. If the nation should suffer as a whole for sin, so must the individual. Personal misfortune was interpreted as a consequence of personal sin, when in most cases it occurs as a result of sins committed by others. The hungry child sleeps at her desk while the septuagenarian on social security tees up on the golf course.

Jesus rails against such hypocrisy in the opening verses of Luke 13. He speaks of Galileans whose blood was added to the Hebrew sacrifices, and the people killed by the collapse of a tower, and warns that they were not alone in their sin. To the audience, he proclaims twice:

Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

But then Jesus tells a strange little story about a landowner that planted a fig tree in his vineyard. When it bears no fruit, he orders his gardener to cut it down as it was “wasting the soil.” To this, the gardener replies [ESV Luke 13:8-9]:

Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put manure on. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.

In many other parables, Jesus speaks of himself as a landowner, prince or bridegroom, but in this case, I see him renewing his role as a tender of life, most familiarly through the parables of the shepherd. To those familiar with the story of the Golden Calf, it might come to mind that God threatened to destroy the entire Hebrew nation, and relented only when Moses assumed responsibility for their future conduct.

Here Jesus says that the problem is not with the Hebrew people (the tree) but with the ground they are planted in. He vows to spread his loving spirit on them, and counsels that they will flower and bear fruit under his care.

And if not, then God may destroy them. Note that: the landowner orders the gardener to cut down the tree, and the gardener offers to care for it another year, building a bond of caring that means that the landowner must do the work of clearing the ground.

In disobeying the owner the following year, will the gardener himself by cut down? Is Jesus offering this assurance to his disciples: “I will care for you as Moses did, and if you fall, I will fall with you.” Recognizing both that sin must not be allowed to take root in the land, but also committing himself without reservation to preservation of the tree of human spirit that will eventually spread Divine Love over the entire world?

Ultimately, the only stable security is in knowing that we are loved. God is the only perfect source of that love, but his restless seeking to heal the world means that we cannot take that love and hide from the world. We cannot “retire” in comfort. We must go into the dark places where people hunger and live in fearful ignorance and bring them love. If we do not, love will pass round us seeking another way, and the sins of others will overwhelm us.

God’s purpose is pure, and embraces everything. It can serve us only if we serve others.

God loves us, but he cannot be bargained with like we can bargain with a government.

But why would we want to?

Intelligence and Creativity

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Joseph at Rationalizing the Universe explores the modern formulation, rooted in Goedel’s Theorem of logical incompleteness, of living with uncertainty. The following discussion ensued:

Brian

You point out correctly that Goedel’s theorem is restricted to a fairly narrow problem: proving that a proof system is “correct” – i.e. – that its axioms and operations are consistent. In other words, we can’t take a set of axioms and apply the operations to disprove any other axiom.

This seems to lead to the conclusion that we can’t trust our proofs of anything, which means that there are no guarantees that our expectations will be met. Unfortunately, expectations are undermined by many other problems, among them determination of initial conditions, noise and adaptation. The last is the special bete noir of sociology, as people will often violate social norms in order to assuage primitive drives.

At this point in my life, I am actually not at all troubled by these problems. Satisfaction is not found in knowing the truth, it is found in realizing creative possibilities. If we could use mathematics to optimize the outcome of social and economic systems, we would have no choices left. Life would become terribly boring. So what is interesting to me is to apply understanding of the world to imagine new possibilities. Mathematics is a useful tool in that process, particularly when dealing with dumb matter.

This brings me back to the beginning of the post: you state that “mathematics is the unspoken language of nature.” If there is anything that Goedel’s theorem disproves, it is precisely that statement. Mathematics is a tool, just as poetry and music are tools. At times, both of the latter have transported my mind to unseen vistas; mathematics has never had that effect.

Joseph

You raise a very interesting point; if we could optimise everything then would we take all of the joy out of being…. you may well be right. I know I get a lot of my satisfaction from the quest to know more. Although I disagree that Godel’s theorems disprove my original statement in this sense; language is essentially about describing things. That is why you can have different languages but they are easily translatable…. bread/pan/brot etc…. we all know what they mean because they all describe the same thing. In exactly the same way, mathematics describes things that actually exist; that isn’t to say nature is mathematics at all – mathematics is the language of nature but it is just as human in its construction as the spoken word. But is matter not matter because a human invented the label? Matter is matter.

To be, these theorems don’t break down all of our proofs; but what they do show is a vital point about logic. One which I think is going to become and increasingly big issue as the quest to understand and build artificial intelligence increases – can we every build a mind as intelligent as a humans when a human can know the answer to a non-programmable result? We hope so! Or rather I do – I do appreciate it’s not for everyone

Brian

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I must caution that the mathematical analogies in classical physics cannot be extended in the same way to the quantum realm. Richard Feynman warned us that there is no coherent philosophy of quantum mechanics – it is just a mathematical formulation that produces accurate predictions. Ascribing physical analogies to the elements of the formulation has always caused confusion. An extreme example was found in the procedure of renormalization, in which observable physical properties such as mass and charge are produced as the finite ratio of divergent integrals.

Regarding human and digital intelligence: one of the desirable characteristics of digital electronics is its determinism. The behavior of transistor gates is rigidly predictable, as is the timing of clock signals that controls that propagation of signals through logic arrays. This makes the technology a powerful tool to us in implementing our intentions.

But true creativity does not arise from personal control, which only makes me loom bigger in the horizon of others’ lives, threatening (as the internet troll or Facebook post-oholic) to erase their sense of self. Rather, creativity in its deepest sense arises in relation, in the consensual intermingling of my uniqueness with the uniqueness of others.

Is that “intelligence?” Perhaps not – the concept itself is difficult to define, and I believe that it arises as a synthesis of more primitive mental capacities, just as consciousness does. But I doubt very much that Artificial Intelligence is capable of manifestations of creativity, because fundamentally it has no desires. It is a made thing, not a thing that has evolved out of a struggle, spanning billions of years, for realization. Our creativity arises out of factors over which we have no control: meeting a spouse-to-be, witnessing an accident, or suffering a debilitating disease. We have complex and subtle biochemical feedback systems which evolved to recognize and adjust to the opportunities and imperatives of living. We are a long way from being able to recreate that subtlety in digital form, and without those signals, meaningful relation cannot evolve, and thus creativity is still-born.

Love Purifies

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Ecstatic Dance is demanding, and we get injured every now and then. I came away from this afternoon’s session with a strain in my lower back. It loosened up as I was pedaling back from the train station, but I know it will hurt again tomorrow morning.

Some people find the best way to deal with a nagging injury is just to dance more. I find this to be particularly true with the injury occurred off the floor. The quotidian world is full of angry energy, and the tension that results from stress allows it to tunnel its way into our bodies. Dancing with people that really love to dance is a great way to chase it away.

But it doesn’t always work.

My way of ministering to people with deeply rooted psychic wounds is to stand ten feet away and imagine touching the wound with my finger tips. I don’t push or pull forcefully. Instead, I caress it, until it willingly wraps itself around my fingers. Drawing it loose, I gather it into my heart.

Now it’s a little different when the wound is generated consciously. That’s a case of possession, which often can be mild, but in some cases can be disabling. Then it’s a little different. I usually end up with my heart pressed against a shoulder or back, patiently waiting for them to relax until I can reach the source of the trouble. Then I inhale it. What is good seems to end up in my heart; what remains is expelled into the air.

What you might guess from this is that I consider smacking people on the forehead to be useless. You have to send love in to fill the spiritual void.

Now taking in all this negativity probably sounds a little scary, and I do have resources that are unusual. But at root, it all boils down to this: if your make your heart God’s tool, there is absolutely nothing that can get into it that will hurt you. And what comes out of it is guaranteed to be helpful to the injured party.

So to be clear: I’m really not doing anything except to provide sensory input. Love does the work.

The same holds true in psychic conflict, which is an important part of physical violence. Violence is a way of imposing our will upon others, but that imposition has no support. The spirits don’t want to feel the pain of the victim, unless they are deeply wounded themselves and just trying to spread misery. Even in that case, what they really want is healing. So I offer it to them. I vacuum them up into my heart.

But what if the person is genuinely trying to love people? What if I am mistaken in my judgment? Well, then I am actually completely impotent. The psychic energy is happy where it is, and chooses to stay there. The conflict is therefore rooted in simple misunderstanding, and what usually ends up happening is affirmation that builds strength in both of us.

Ultimately, then, I can’t take anything from people that love themselves and others.

Dying in Peace

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Standard Christian theology is that Christ died so that God could forgive our sins. But I think that Jesus said something a little more subtle: that he would die for “the forgiveness of sin.”

As I understand it, God is not about choosing those worthy to live in his presence, he is concerned with healing. A sin is a sin because it leaves a wound in the soul. That wound cannot be healed until we are ready to forgive the sin – to let it go so that it may be displaced by love. When that occurs, even the most vicious criminal becomes qualified to enter paradise.

Even better, though, is to hold on to the sin. It is to do as Jesus did – to allow the sin to take hold of us, and then to forgive it so that it may be suffused by love, and so made noble.

Death is a sin because is separates things that cherish one another. That cherishing reflects a mutually beneficial relationship. So for death to enforce such separation is to deny the parties those benefits, and thus to wound them.

In dying, Jesus allowed the servants of Death (the priests that slaughtered innocent creatures on the altar) to have their way with him, and forgave them. He suffused death with love, and so became the Prince of Peace.

How does that work? Because warring parties need to be separated. That can be accomplished in death, but what Jesus does is offer a spiritual refuge in which we can reflect until we figure out how to share strength with the ones we war against.

Sometimes, of course, that is our selves. Peace starts within, and when we accept Jesus, we allow him into our hearts and minds and grant him loving dominion over the conflicts that rage within us.

As Cain learned, it isn’t easy, but God understands that sin cannot be healed unless we wrestle with it. Terrible things happen: Cain murdered his brother Abel. But even then, that most heinous of sins was not punished with death. Instead, Cain was sent away to think, reflect, and become stronger.