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Is ‘God’ Low-Entropy?

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When I was in college, my professor in Introductory Physics rebutted an argument for God that touted life as a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. The devout claimed that life preserved order against the inevitable tide of entropy. My professor responded by asking us to consider the poop vs. net body weight ratio for babies. Life does increase entropy – (male) physicists just tend to hide from the fact.

Now researchers are discovering that “funny” words, such as those invented by Dr. Seuss, have a “low” entropy – they use combinations of unusual letters. It strikes me that ‘God’ may be one of those combinations. There’s the old atheist snipe “‘God’ is ‘dog’ spelled backwards.” And of course we have Sam Beckett’s intellectual tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” Are these funny simply because the letter combinations in ‘god’, ‘dog’ and ‘Godot’ are risible?

Maybe there was something in the old convention: “Elohim”, which became “Allah.” As “‘Allah’ Akbar!”, I may be allowed to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens: as a designation, “‘God’ is not great!”

Or maybe the low-entropy proof for God has simply eluded us. Maybe a low-entropy name is just what God would want – you know, bring smiles to our faces?

Welcoming the Light of Love

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Stephen Harrod Buhner closes The Lost Language of Plants just as I would have hoped. After recounting a healing session with a young lady, the book closes with four autobiographic sketches, each by a herbologist recounting immersion in biophilia. Left behind are the recriminations and the tone of moral superiority that marred the preceding chapters. Each of the writers focuses on the opportunity before us now – an opportunity to call into being relationships built around affirmations of love shared with the world around us.

As the book progressed, lunging between the yin and yang of natural and industrial chemistry, I found myself remembering my experiences of being stalked by predators. One was at a Webelos overnighter, of all things, at Camp Whitsett in the Southern Sierras. A Native American elder inducted a number of the senior scouts in a fire ceremony. As the ceremony progressed, I had a strong sense of the bear in the man, and felt the fire of predation building in the camp as the boys settled in to sleep. Rather than hiding from it, I let it enter into my heart, sent my will into the forest to demonstrate that no bears were present, and then breathed peace into the space I had cleared. The fear resided, and the camp settled into slumber. Several years later, I was driving home from work on Friday night, knowing that my youngest son had been sent to the Sierras on a camping trip, and felt the bear again in his presence. I sent the warning “Wake up, Gregory! Get Mr. Povah!” When he returned that Sunday, I learned that on Saturday morning, he had woken early, and heard a noise as Mr. Povah’s son Braden was dragged away from the camp by a black bear. The onrush of shouting campers scared the bear off, and Braden survived with only a bruised ankle.

Given his immersion in the natural world, I doubt that Buhner has not had similar experiences. But perhaps not – he has been chosen by the world of chlorophyll, the deep, patient source of renewal. That touches the animal realm through the herbivores, an intimate co-creative process that Buhner documents in loving detail. But the animal kingdom has another dimension as well: in Love Works, I enumerate the rites of blood – sex, maternity, the hunt and sacrifice. Each of these has its unique pathologies, and the fragility of animal existence means that those pressures are often driven into fear and rage.

In Dune, the great science-fiction author Frank Herbert advances the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

It was this discipline that I exercised in Camp Whitsett. It is the discipline of the rational mind, a discipline that safeguards our ability to perceive clearly and so to exercise our intelligence when facing circumstances that our natural talents could never hope to overcome. It is to perceive the forces in play with the aim of negotiating a win-win outcome when the predator’s zero-sum mentality holds sway.

As I finished the life sketches that close The Lost Language of Plants, I was filled with the desire to find these people and join forces with them. A great barrier arose, followed by a vision and memory. Buhner shares the plant kingdom’s experience of light, that great source of love that originates from the sun and desires to merge with us through them. But when discussing with my sister the ecological disasters that will confront our children, I told her,

This is how we heal the world: by teaching the plants not simply to receive passively the light, but to reach up to the sun and guide its power to rebuild the devastated forests and savannahs.

This may seem like a little thing, but to accomplish it we have to convince them to surrender the conventions of the chemistry that Buhner celebrates so tenderly. It is to recognize that it is not the plant that is important, but the spiritual transformation that gives courage to the fearful through its physical manifestations.

Buhner touches on this metaphorically in describing his healing work. He testifies that he meets people that are missing parts, and is guided by visions of plants that can fill those voids. It is in establishing those relationships that healing arrives, through an expansion of spirit that occurs when our hollowness is filled.

I spent the rest of the day struggling with the grief that filled me then.

It has two parts. The first is that the plant is only an intermediary – it is a reservoir in which love gathers, but it is not the source itself. It was the source that disciplined me, forcing me stand apart until people realize that all intermediaries are imperfect. Secondly: in that place apart we are beset by those that would ravage the gardens that Buhner and his peers create. We plant the seeds of knowledge, and watch as they are corrupted by the predators. We heal the wounded, and set them again into the world, hoping that each time the light of love reaches more deeply into them.

It is hard to be told that our path has led us into evil. I wish that Buhner could see that scientific reductionism is a means of removing the primitive triggers of predation from the world. Yes, it has gone too far, but it has also created the field in which he and his friends plant their garden.

Lest we wish to repeat the experience of Eden, we must leave recrimination behind. I take solace that in his closing Buhner celebrates the light of love that will ultimately unite us all.

Respecting Parents that Plan

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Who do you think you serve, you constructors of lies?

A woman that has an abortion lives the truth of her experience, and learns from it. It has been my honor to bring healing to them and their unborn children.

Only Satan turns a man’s mind to murder when love offers the alternative of healing.

You stand with one foot on the bridge to destruction. There’s only so long that Christ can hold you back.

OK. Still with the whining.

Let me be clear: if you haven’t had an abortion, or brought somebody through one to healing:

Think of the redemption that Christ brought to Saul on the road to Damascus.

And SHUT THE FUCK UP!

A Species of Thinking

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When I stepped to the counter with The Lost Language of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner, I broke in on a conversation between the proprietress and a customer hawking her capabilities as a spirit healer. Unaware that I was incubating a serious respiratory infection, I went looking for a juice bar hoping to restore the energy expended earlier in the day while dancing in Culver City. It was kind of a random walk up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, trying to orient myself to the addresses provided by Cortana, but as I waited to cross Fifth Street I was accosted by the customer, who broke in hopefully “I saw that book you bought, too.” Without turning my head, I observed “Yeah, I bought it because I realized that I am paying too much attention to people,” and stepped into the crosswalk as the signal changed.

The first chapter of the book was a balm to my soul. Buhner writes of being introduced to “wild water” by his grandfather, a man that maneuvered through brush as though guiding a lady across a crowded dance floor (my image, not Buhner’s). Like Buhner, I feared the consequences to my sons of the lack of access to wild places, and lugged 50-pound backpacks up and down the Sierras to be where I could share my affinity with them. In reading how trees will irrigate the soil by pulling water to the surface while their stoma are closed at night, I remembered walking by a reservoir surrounded by parched stands of oak, and trying to tell the trees closest to the water to lift some to their brothers further up the hill. In celebrating the mystical insights of tribal peoples, Buhner reveals the richness and suggestiveness of their taxonomic terminology, and exposes again and again how their myths reflect the biochemical dependencies between species. The book also dwells lovingly on the transformations that occur as life propagates into a receptive environment. This poetical celebration of the tenacity and interdependence of the lower orders of life is one thread of Buhner’s exposition.

The second thread warns of the disaster that looms due to humanity’s disruption of the chemical balance of the natural world. This takes many forms: replacement of complex biomes with industrial monocultures such as wheat and corn; dispersal of long-lived cosmetics and pharmaceuticals that disrupt natural endocrine responses and breed superpests; replacement or suppression of wildlife that served to cycle nutrients through soil; and mass harvesting of plant life that releases natural chemicals to soil in amounts that overwhelm the bacteria and fungi that process them for reuse. Each of these factors contributes to the impending extinction of many plant species.

As a reader, both threads serve to illuminate the reality experienced by the plant kingdom, so I cannot complain about this book in the same way that I complained about A Global History of Christians. But, confronting the loss of so much that he holds dear, Buhner beats a straw man: scientific reductionism. In the rush of each discipline to grasp the mechanisms that determine that characteristics of its subject, science has ignored the systemic interactions that ensure the fertility and robustness of natural biomes. This includes our symbiotic relationships: the bacteria, fungi and nematodes that live within and on us in a balance that medicines disrupt, sometimes irrecoverably.

But I find that Buhner goes too far in asserting the wisdom of the natural world. His claims are disproven by the impact of invasive species. If nature always kept balance, how do:

  • cane toads run amok in Australia,
  • kudzu and Spanish moss infest the forests of the American South,
  • European songbirds wipe out the smaller songbirds of the New World, and
  • European grasses choke out the sagebrush of the West?

Such imbalances are only restored through extinction and restoration of diversity through exploitation of new opportunities in the devastated habitats. While human transportation serves to facilitate such traumas, in the modern era it is only the pace of disruption that is unnatural, not the phenomenon itself.

This extends, of course, to the most invasive species of all: homo sapiens sapiens. While Buhner decries scientific reductionism, yet its terminology and tools provide the insights that he uses to cast his poetic glamour over the reader. In describing the formation of humus (p. 165) he identifies “flavonoids, degraded lignin, terpenes, lignans, and tannins,” then continues:

Humus is mostly two substances, humic acid and a combination of polysaccharides or sugar molecules. No one knows how humic acid forms, but once formed it acts like a living substance and possesses a number of unique characteristics. It forms crystals, much like snowflakes in a sense, and, like snowflakes, no identical ones have ever been found.

While humus is a biochemical reservoir that facilitates growth, the virtue of plant medicine also reflects strategies used by plants to destroy competitors and parasites.

As Buhner documents, this natural biochemical productivity dwarfs human activity. The difference is that the products of natural biochemistry are introduced slowly enough that bacteria learn to process them. Sometimes that adaptation requires millions of years – lignin, for example, is the substance that trees use to form wood. When it first evolved, trees did not decompose after falling, but accumulated on the forest floor until burning. Oxygen content in the atmosphere soared to 30%, and the giant insects displaced other land animals. When bacteria finally learned to digest lignin, conditions reverted, triggering another jarring disruption to the global ecology.

How is the human incursion different in kind from these events? To Buhner, it seems to boil down to “once we knew better.” This is not to say that we understood. In contrast to the reductionist scientific epistemology of a mechanistic reality, Buhner celebrates the epistemology of “pre-industrial” cultures. Their medical practitioners universally ascribe their wisdom to (page 33):

“nonordinary” experiences, specifically: dreams, visions, direct communications from the plant, or sacred beings.

Was this good enough? Did Life make a mistake in creating humanity? Or do we exist because Life sought for solutions to problems that could be solved no other way?

Consider our agriculture: corn, wheat and rice are not naturally occurring varieties. Their utility as foodstuffs reflects the pressure of human selection, and is manifested in both the quantity and chemical stability of their output. As a result, humanity invests far less mental effort gathering food than it did, liberating a privileged class to the pursuit of understanding.

Buhner decries the regimentation of scientific disciplines which is accompanied by the growth of intellectual barriers that impede systems thinking. But is this not just as in the natural world? Buhner describes the intermingling of distinct species in the soil layer, each contributing to the survival of the others. Is that not the situation in the sciences?

As each natural species can be traced back to bacteria, yet is considered distinct from it, could we not celebrate the emergence of distinct disciplines from the common root of humanity? Perhaps, over the long run, what Life is interested in is a liberation from random evolutionary pressures punctuated by traumatic extinctions. In the short term, humanity was bound to make a mess before mastering our practice, and our pride and myopia is certainly exacerbating our difficulties. In the end, though, I believe that we will enter into a golden era of thoughtful evolution, empowered by the human capacity to evolve new species of thought.

Continued…

The Book on Mormon

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The Conejo Valley Interfaith Celebration of Thanks has attracted Mormon participation in the last few years. As a recent schism, the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) appears to feel obligated to broadcast its political alignments. That was expressed in rather lengthy and unexpected mini-sermons that celebrated freedom of religion and events during the formation of the United States that brought their presider, George Washington, to the conclusion that divine agency was at work.

I’ve offered my thoughts on separation of church and state before. But these specific observations resonated far more deeply in me.

On the birthday that marked the end of my seven of sevens year, I was out at Taos, New Mexica, where my parents shared that I was conceived in the mountains that in the last half of the twentieth century become known as “Sangre de Christo.” Without foresight, my visit coincided with the Taos pow-wow. I arrived early and settled under the awnings that had been raised around the circular field. I tried to quiet my thoughts and sink into the ground, not wanting to disturb the proceedings.

As I sat there meditating, one of the elders came up to the nearest drum circle and asked “Would you like to start us off?” I remarked upon my good fortune, and let the wild thrum and staccato percussion wind its way through me. It drove me deeper and out, again the familiar stranger riding on a celebration of life. It wasn’t all simple – a just grief fills the people. I accepted their judgment, and drifted through it towards a red veil.

Piercing it, I found myself with Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior-shaman who had rallied the Indians against the perfidy of William Harrison, then governor of the Indiana territory. When he turned his attention to me, his great hunger found its way to our first African-American president. In self-consolation, he observed “So there is some justice.”

Tecumseh’s summation of the Native American experience of the European invasion is compelling:

Brothers, we all belong to one family; we are all children of the Great Spirit; we walk in the same path; slake our thirst at the same spring; and now affairs of the greatest concern lead us to smoke the pipe around the same council fire! Brothers, we are friends; we must assist each other to bear our burdens. The blood of many of our fathers and brothers has run like water on the ground, to satisfy the avarice of the white men. We, ourselves, are threatened with a great evil; nothing will pacify them but the destruction of all the red men. Brothers, when the white men first set foot on our grounds, they were hungry; they had no place on which to spread their blankets, or to kindle their fires. They were feeble; they could do nothing for themselves. Our fathers commiserated their distress, and shared freely with them whatever the Great Spirit had given his red children. They gave them food when hungry, medicine when sick, spread skins for them to sleep on, and gave them grounds, that they might hunt and raise corn. Brothers, the white people are like poisonous serpents: when chilled, they are feeble and harmless; but invigorate them with warmth, and they sting their benefactors to death. The white people came among us feeble; and now that we have made them strong, they wish to kill us, or drive us back, as they would wolves and panthers.

Only thirteen years after Tecumseh’s death, Joseph Smith reported his encounter with the angel Moroni, guardian of the teachings of the Book of Mormon. As many, I did not conjoin the two events. But when I read the book, having been given a copy by my supervisor at work, I clearly heard this heart-broken plea from the angels entrusted to guide the Native American peoples:

We will submit to the authority of your Christ. We will chain our people to the glory of your nation. But please, be merciful: Do not destroy our children!

I doubt that the speakers at Wednesday’s event will read these words, but I wonder how they would react, given their celebration of American exceptionalism including freedom of religion, to an understanding that their faith originated in a desperate attempt to survive cultural aggression of the worst kind – one of the two great Holocausts of America’s founding.

While I only spent a few months with the man who shared the Book of Mormon with me, we had several conversations after hours on religious and cultural topics, in which he struggled in particular with my support for same-sex marriage. What made those conversations memorable, however, was the phenomenon that accompanied them: the room would fill with light as we spoke. It was clear to me that my friend was seeking for Christ with all his heart.

A year or two later, the day after the pow-wow in Taos, I encountered an Indian elder in the pueblo craft shop. We fell to talking about his experience as an artist, which started with silver jewelry in the aftermath of his service in World War II. I asked how he learned the skill, and he said “I taught myself.” I bought a two-throated vase, noticing the defects of hand crafting. As we spoke, I walked to the door and looked out into the afternoon sky, feeling his awareness spread with mine. After wrapping the purchase, he concluded the encounter with these words:

I feel that we have touched the world today.

We need these people so much – their humility, their love of nature, their patience. I hope that if Christ should choose to return to them the power that he received in trust from the Great Spirit, the people that have assumed the name of Mormon will not fight against that restoration.

Response to “Are Christianity and Capitalism Compatible?”

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Source post is here.

Thanks for the link back to my post.

A comment on the history of economics (see Nasar’s “The Grand Pursuit”), motivated primarily by the principle that just as we should not hold Christ responsible for all the terrible things done in his name, so we should not hold Adam Smith responsible for all the things done in his name.

At the beginning of the 19th century, economic thought was dominated by Malthus. The “dismal science” held that there was no escape from widespread poverty, because the growth of systems of production appeared incapable of keeping pace with population growth at the subsistence level. This meant that, no matter how freely owners distributed profits to the workers, population would continue to grow until poverty imposed a constraint on lifespan. This justified much of conservative thought of the era, which held that sustaining the institutions of the state in the face of ravenous poverty was essential, lest the entire body of humanity be reduced to barbarism

Capitalism found a way out of this dilemma, essentially by supplementing the productive capacity of individual workers with machinery. The upshot was that, while wages per piece produced fell (as decried by Marx), the cost of goods fell even faster. This instituted an era of enormous growth in the global standard of living and average life span.

Unfortunately, this boon comes largely from our harvest of the bounty of the Earth – in the West, each of us consumes energy equivalent to 200 man-years of labor. This has been indulged without a mind to sustainability, so it looks as though we are likely to return to Malthusian economic outcomes in the near future.

I would note that the economic practices of the early Christian communities did not focus on the mechanisms of production or the issues of sustainability. These were beyond the ken of all except the most sophisticated members of society. In fact, the Fall of Rome and the ensuing deurbanization and decay of the social order was so traumatic to the Church fathers that they spent the next 1500 years trying to reestablish the Roman Empire, which they saw as the first Christian nation and therefore “God’s kingdom on earth.”

So I would suggest that capitalism, with its hopeful, rational and scientific view of productive processes, is not incompatible with Christianity. We are still left with two problems to confront: maturity regarding procreative opportunity (each of us needs to ask “can I actually love a child into the future he/she deserves?” and discipline ourselves accordingly), and fairness in the distribution of wealth, which currently is seriously out of whack in America.

Anti-Christ Anti-Scientist

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A few years back, National Geographic ran a photo essay on the Alaskan tundra. In the publication notes at the back, the photographer recounted a conversation with a native regarding the urban tourists that passed through each year. When asked to characterize them, the native, a man who lived in solitude for most of the year, remarked that “They seem lonely.” That loneliness reflects not a lack of human association Rather, it is a deep disconnection in our souls from the root of life.

This problem is so characteristic of modern societies that, in our search to escape our constructed reality, we tend to gloss over the defects of ancient cultures. Pagan worshippers extol the virtues of Roman worship for its naturalism, ignoring the paternalism that gave license to fathers to murder their dependents. The homeopathic intuition of native healers is lauded, ignoring the vicious lore of hexes and curses. And nobody appears to want to reflect that xenophobia was endemic to all the ancient cultures, with outsiders that looked and spoke differently treated as inferiors.

But if the ancient world mixed its spiritual vices and virtues, it is still fair to ask why the spread of modern civilization has resulted in a spiritual divorce. Naturally, critics seeking to heal the divide focus on the dominant elements of modern culture. I am sympathetic to these concerns:

  • Science applies methods of analytical reductionism to reveal creative possibilities. Unfortunately, reducing things to their constituent parts is not something that souls engage willingly: to do so would be a form of suicide. Therefore, science achieves its most impressive manifestations in the material realm. Scientists seeking funding for fundamental research have a strong motivation to ignore their failure to explain spiritual phenomena, and tend actually to pretend that souls just don’t exist.
  • Capitalism heralds the efficiency of the free market in responding to unforeseen public needs and opportunities. Unfortunately (as recognized by Adam Smith), the metric of success – the accumulation of wealth – is too crude to support political control of resource exploitation by the greedy. Worse, concentration of wealth has allowed the exploiters to broadcast rationalizations for their behavior, almost all of which cast the exploited resources as spiritually deficient, and therefore not deserving of protection.
  • The traditions of Abraham (dominated by Christianity in American society) tackle the problem of masculine aggression by heralding the power released through submission to unconditional love. Unfortunately, the target population persists in its aggressive recidivism, to the extent that scripture is often quoted selectively (when not completely rewritten) to justify destructive behaviors that are decried universally by the avatar(s). This perversion divorces us from the noblest masculine manifestations of spiritual maturity.

Given the problems outlined above, I would be surprised if it were impossible to assemble evidence that each of the three elements can facilitate depravity. The science of eugenics justified medical experiments on populations (both human and animal) that were considered to lack souls, and therefore believed to be unable to feel pain. Unbridled greed first drove the adoption of slavery in the New World – both of native populations and imported Africans, and now drives us pell-mell down the road to ecological collapse. And the “Great Commission” to propagate the good news of Christ’s resurrection has been used to justify violent suppression of indigenous cultures.

But is it fair to stop there? After all, is not the material construction of our modern reality, with its buildings, appliances and tools, far more conducive to liberty from fear than the natural world we inhabited previously with its predators, diseases, weather and natural disasters? Does not capitalism also distribute wealth and create monetary velocity that supports personal initiative, thereby providing an escape from exploitation? And have not the traditions of Abraham been foremost in providing charitable support of those in need?

For those seeking spiritual reconnection, this seems to leave us in a limbo of ambiguity. If we cannot find the seeds of disconnection in our history, then how are we to escape from the mistakes of the past?

The answer I have held out here is that the way out is to recognize that it’s not just about us.

One of the great gifts of the Bible is that it charts the progression of human spiritual maturity from the heralded “era of innocence” experienced by primitive cultures. In The Soul Comes First, I explain the Biblical days of creation as the history of the evolution of the senses as revealed by the souls that survived the experience. The Garden of Eden is a similar metaphor, in my view. It describes the ideal state sought by the pagans – man and spirit united to create a world of peace. But that unity is sundered by the serpent, who tempts the woman – the nexus of life-engagement – into partaking of the “fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” For that sin, man and woman are cast out of the Garden.

As I expressed it recently to a friend, the great tragedy of the Fall was the sundering of trust. That trust was not only between mankind and spirit, but between man and woman. Ever since, we have been engaged in the sterile course of trying to fix blame for the problem. What we fail to realize, however, is that the source of the problem existed before the Garden. We did not create the serpent, although we were susceptible to its wiles.

We were cast out of Eden not because application of our intelligence was evil, but because we had admitted sin as a guide to our intelligence. Rather than allowing Life to guide our intelligence for good, we became committed to a course of resolving the difference between good and evil, and of developing the strength to choose the good. This is an extremely dangerous path, and the spiritual collective decides that we must be cast out lest we partake of the “Tree of Life” and live forever.

Again, we can think of this in material terms, but from the perspective of the soul of life, this is to say “if man, having admitted the serpent into his mind, enters into the Soul of Life now, then we will never be rid of the serpent.” In Revelation, this aim is made quite clear: the serpent/dragon attempts at one point to assault heaven, and is ultimately destroyed in the final confrontation with Christ.

But what is the serpent? The best way to characterize it is in the contrast between reptilian and mammalian parenting: while the mammalian newborn is nurtured for weeks or years before being forced into independence, the baby Komodo dragon must climb a tree to avoid being eaten by its mother. The reptile manifests the virtues of the predator, seeing in others only resources to be consumed.

So the problem is not science, or capitalism, or Christianity – it is with the ancient reptilian spiritual infection that we must purge. It is our path, on the knowledge of good and evil, to master that influence. It is a skill first encouraged in Cain (“sin crouches at your door, but you can master it”) and delivered by Jesus to the Apostles when he says “what you loose here on earth will be loosed in heaven, and what you bind here on earth will be bound in heaven.”

But until we as a species accede to the disciplines taught by Christ, we will discover, the further we walk with sin down the path of knowledge, the more distant will become our relationships with the Spirit of Life. Not because we can be expected to do differently, nor as punishment for our weakness, but as a matter of its own self-preservation.

Disabused by Revelations

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I’ve been beguiled by synchronicity between my posts and news from the outside world.

Here the New York Times reports on how ISIL and other terrorist organizations are being scammed by those peddling the mysterious and deadly “red mercury.”

Wasn’t that popularized in a recent movie concerning a bunch of old-fart destabilizers of third-world states? Come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past the CIA to feather-bed their retirement accounts by propagating this kind of doomsday-meme.

Revelation Abuse

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I spend a lot of time managing fear and anger – not my own, but the fear and anger that people project into me. One of the principal reasons for writing The Soul Comes First was to deal with the Book of Revelation, which contains murky and frightening imagery that allows psychopaths to manipulate victims by linking fear to the promise of redemption that emanates from the Cross.

An example of the consequences of such manipulation is organized criminality in the  guise of religion, where “leaders” of inspirational movements demand that their “flock” emulate the early church, surrendering their worldly assets for management by the “community.” You can be assured that those at the top live in luxury, while the “flock” scrapes by in poverty.

So, while I would love for people to read the book, let me summarize the main points regarding Revelation. The most important is that John’s experience of the angelic realm should be interpreted as the experience of someone following links on Wikipedia. The flow of events is not strictly linear, and John tends to emphasize events on Earth that are sometimes tangential.

  • The seals were opened billions of years ago. The six symbols seen by John are not manifestations of God’s glory, but manifestations of selfishness: domination, infestation, opportunism, death, vengeance and fury. They are released onto the Earth so that their captives can work themselves free through the process of living.
  • The 144,000 were spirits gathered (billions of years ago) not from the tribes of Israel themselves but from the angels that became the patrons of the tribes of Israel. The are sent down to Earth to facilitate the liberation of the captives.
  • The trumpets correspond powerfully with the facts that paleontology has revealed regarding the great extinction episodes over the last billion years.
  • The Age of Man does not begin until the angel stands with one foot on the shore and one in the sea.
  • The beast with the number ‘666’ represents the spiritual collective that arose on the sixth day of creation, which is not Man, but the mammals.
  • The bowls represent the consequences of our exploitation of the resources that we were told to harvest. Those consequences are coming to full force right now in the modern age.

One of the great and marvelous consequences of the love that emanates from God is that it empowers us to grasp the truth, and moreover to move with confidence and determination to respond to the demands it makes upon our compassion.

Please share this with anyone that you know to have been trapped in fear through manipulation of the teachings of the Book of Revelation.