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Posts clarifying the relationship of Christian scripture and teaching to the evolution of Human Nature.

Religious Intolerance in the Military

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I’ve been active on the Religious Tolerance group on Facebook. I declared my position fairly early on in a posting that stated “all great religious teachings serve to transform an existence driven by lies, fear and death into an existence guided by truth, hope and life.” However there are those that see me as a Christian proselytizer, largely because I quote scripture. This makes me sad. I write there because I believe that “Christian intolerance” is rooted in false teaching, and that if we look in scripture, we will find evidence to that effect. I quote scripture because I believe that it is the best tool that we have for combating intolerance masquerading as Christianity.

This is nowhere more evident than in those that use death threats in order to conquer institutions in “the name of Christ.” I have been made aware recently of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the death threats issued against its members and their families by Christian militants.

We don’t have to attain much depth of spiritual experience before we become aware that spiritual evolution did not begin with humanity. The dominant personalities in the spiritual realm, prior to our emergence, were the predators that stand atop the biological food chain. These would have been the dinosaurs (which appear as the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the dragon in Revelation) and the bear and great cats (the mammalian predators) that appear in Revelation and Daniel’s Dream of the Four Beasts.

Revelation is best understood as the history of the unseating of predation as the driver of evolution in favor of intelligent engineering that is informed by unconditional love. This is not a clean and simple process, and is made more difficult because humanity has only a dim perception of the spiritual dynamics. What transpires in Revelation 13:11-15 is that the dragon dresses up as the lamb and empowers the mammalian predators to religious dominance. As it is written: “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast – all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”, that lamb being Christ. Clearly, those that follow the beast do not follow Christ.

The beast continues to promulgate teaching that “anyone that does not worship the idol must die.” The beast famously bears the number “666.” While John points out that this is the number of man (who was created on the sixth “day”), six is also the number of the “day” of mammals that attained evolutionary dominance after the fall of the dinosaurs.

So what is directly written in the Bible is that the use of death threats is false teaching, and actually anti-Christ.

That this teaching is particularly strong in the military, which is an institution organized to harness the forces of predation, is not at all surprising. As I see it, those that resist this process, such as Mr. Weinstein and his colleagues, are agents of truth and life, and regardless of their profession of faith, are held in the heart of Christ with the most tender concern and honored regard.

Loving Women

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For the last two years, I have been frequenting a restaurant down in Calabasas that has live music Friday and Saturday nights. One of the owners decided on Friday that I couldn’t dance there anymore. The band had come back on stage, and the floor that the DJ had filled up was emptied. I went out, as I usually do, and danced by myself, filling the floor up with joy. When I walked off, the party of twelve at the front table began applauding wildly. That’s when he walked up and told me to never dance that way again. I frowned at him, and asked “Why?”, and he just stalked off.

The bouncer came up and told me that, while he didn’t agree with the owner, he had been told to tell me that I couldn’t dance there. So I took my sweater and left. The manager intercepted me at the parking lot and made his apologizes as well. I asked him not to worry about it, and to have a wonderful holiday season.

The thing that cracks me up was that people have approached me and said that they had seen videos of me dancing on YouTube. The bands have approached me, too, just to say how wonderful it is to play when I’m there with them. So here I am, generating trade for this venue, never having hurt anybody in two years, and they basically throw me out.

While some rationale was put forward about liability in case of an accident, I have a sense that something else was going on. There’s a group of four gigolos that hang out there, and they’ve been really proud to make a point of setting the owners against me. One of them in particular is actually dangerous: his “come-on” move on the dance floor is to trip the lady and throw her over into a deep back bend. I’ve actually seen girls walk off the floor in pain. Recently I had a woman ask to dance with me, and the first thing out of her mouth was “no back bends”. I had a pretty good idea who had put that into her head.

Their problem is that they can’t pick up women when I’m on the dance floor. We just get this glow of joy going. While I’ve had women come on pretty strong, for me it’s not a sexual thing. It’s just the joy of feeling what women feel when they no longer have to fight off the dirt that the world heaps on them.

There’s a “Freedom From Religion” group out on Facebook that cross-posts to the Religious Tolerance group. I decided to go out and see what their dialog is like on their home turf, and the first post quoted a male sympathizer of the women’s suffrage movement. In summary, the quote said that the Bible was a piece of trash that never taught anything of value to anyone. The issue of the day, of course, was the admonition in Paul’s letters that women should be “submissive” to their husbands, which was used by some to justify the denial of voting rights to women.

I have to admit, until you get to Luke, the Bible is really not good to women. When I was at Torah study one day, a young lady got really upset about that, and I leaned over and whispered: “You know, you’re right. But the Bible is all about men’s problems.” We weren’t good enough for you ladies, and that’s part of why Daniel 11:37 describes Jesus as “the one desired by women.”

So what is the problem with men? Well, we’re designed to change things. Unfortunately, the easiest way to change something is to break it. I see so many men struggling with this, and I have to say, I have submitted myself. What’s kept me steadiest is the strong sense of feminine approval I receive when I try to fix things. Mostly, of course, that’s fixing people’s hearts, and women bring me a lot of opportunities. Not just to work on them: women feel things deeply, and carry people around with them.

So: thank-you for being what you are. Please just try to remember that you’re supposed to feel that way all of the time. And grant me the benefit of this testimony: the example of Jesus is what made me what I am.

On Dying

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When I sat down with the pastor at St. Maximillian’s to discuss my spiritual journey, the pitch was pretty blunt: “Tell me, Brian, do you want to die, or live forever?”

Today, I have arrows in my quiver that I didn’t have then. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” [Matt. 16:25] Not that I wasn’t concerned about survival then, but that concern was overshadowed by incredibly powerful dreams. I needed somebody to help me sort through them, so the response he got back was a disappointed stare.

Now I didn’t expect to die, so the sense in which I was losing my life at that time was that held by most people reading Jesus’s words. My way of living was being consumed by powerful forces that I could not overcome with force. The only weapon that I had was my heart. I was committed to surrendering myself to loving, no matter the cost.

But in an earlier era, most people would have taken those words as a literal pronouncement: those that perish for me will find life. Certainly death was part of the early Christian experience, with thousands of martyrs to the faith. But how is that “for Christ”?

We celebrate sacrificial nobility in those that died in combat securing our freedom. That was perhaps also the understanding of those that died fighting for the faith during the Crusades and other Christian wars. But how does that square with the first part: “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it”? Doesn’t every warrior wish to return to home and family?

Christ died on the cross to bring perfect love into the world. In Matt. 10-38, he admonishes “…he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” From this, it seems clear that to die for Jesus is dying to bring love into the world. That is hard, because the only reason that our lives are not filled with love is because we chose, of our own will, to reject it. Why would we do that? Because we’re infected with a disease called selfishness.

Look at what Jesus did on the cross: he submitted to the religious and secular authorities of his age. They forced their wills upon him, and he did not resist. Because of that, they became stuck in his compassion. He infected them with the seeds of loving.

Obviously, that is taking a great long time to work itself out. But the message is that dying is nothing to fear, at least so long as the manner of our dying is to bring love into the world.

Now Jesus’s surrender to evil was obvious and dramatic, involving public orations and processions. Very few people in Jerusalem would have been unaware. For most of us, taking up the cross is a lonely, silent affair. We don’t wrestle with Satan in all his power, we wrestle with petty evil in spouses and bosses, employees and rapists. That can have its toll on us. A family member once shared an anecdote about a visit with a rich business partner, a man that took his children up to the top of a building to throw paper airplanes down into the streets in violation of a sign that said “Do not throw paper airplanes.” (Think about it: would you go out of your way to do that?) This was a pattern in his business dealings as well. His wife was a twisted crone, beaten down by the burden of the anger that the world had mounted against her husband.

How long should we struggle against the burden of others’ sin? Only so long as we can face it without falling into fear. Trying to live with uncontrollable pain is heroic until we lose our heroism. Then it becomes a slow cancerous submission of our souls to evil.

Is there hope? Always, but Jesus offers the guarantee this way: “whoever loses his life for me will find it.” Jesus could have chosen to hang on the cross in suffering, suffer into eternity. But he did not because he knew that another life awaited him. He knew that to attain that life he needed to surrender his body.

Thus it is with those that suffer pain in this world, pain brought on by their sin and the sins of others. They need to lose their bodies to selfishness, to let it wind itself into their flesh, and then to escape into death, purified in spirit as was Jesus. It is thus that we weaken evil by trapping it in decaying matter, and free those portions of our soul into loving as are willing to accept love.

So when you pronounce against death, remember that death was Jesus’s tool of choice. Look into the soul of the person dying, and do not push them past their ability to endure. Do not block that moment of release, lest you stretch it into a torment of possession.

Rather, send them off with that most tender of incantations: “S(he) has gone to a better world.” With that little push too empower them, perhaps they’ll be motivated to look back in time when they get there, and reach out to pull us through behind them.

Don’t Surrender Hope

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In the sleepy upper-middle-class haven of the Conejo Valley, true hunger for ideas is hard to find. That makes it hard to sustain attendance at the Monday read-and-critique. People come thinking that they want to share ideas, but what they discover under that veneer is a need for easy sympathy and attention.

The organizer, Mark, hews to a quorum of three. We both ordered a sandwich plate, and he sat politely as I finished mine. Mark agonizes over personal defects that might contribute to our inability to develop a third partner from the dozen or so visitors that have passed through the group since June. I’m not sure that he realizes that we’re both pretty demanding writers, high on technology and complex character dynamics. We may be fighting a “WTF” response.

Mark writes steam punk for young adults. He loves detail and the trappings of decadence, although his heroes and heroines usually preserve order and independence by exploiting the weakness of the nobility. His latest book, Red Jacket, has been out for several months. Steam punk is like a kaleidoscope: pick your favorite eras and personalities, mash them together, and imagine how they’d interact in the hot-house you’ve created. Perhaps recognizing the fecundity of the genre, Mark bought a block of fifty ISBN numbers when he set out to self-publish.

Mark also does his own illustrations, and his stereo-wheel viewer was out on the table when I sat down. I flipped through the series of trained elephants, most of which looked pretty miserable. After his remark that animals only survive as commercial assets, the conversation nose-dived into the nether reaches of bleakness. I tried throughout the evening to introduce a note of hope, but Mark resisted, reporting that Google had terminated is global climate stabilization research project after reaching the conclusion that disaster was inevitable.

The material facts are terrifying. As the northern hemisphere thaws, we’re going to have another 80 years of CO2 emissions released to the atmosphere from the decay of the tundra. When the Arctic ice melts, the Gulf Stream will shut down and Europe will freeze. Coastal waters around the world may stagnate, releasing clouds of hydrogen sulfide that will asphyxiate all of the larger animals. And then there’s the human sociology: drops in agricultural productivity will make many urban centers unsustainable, and when people start starving they’ll start shooting each other.

I argued that under these conditions, armed confrontation may be almost impossible to sustain. It’s one thing if you can grab land and live by hunting. It’s another when you have to ply the land with fertilizers and irrigation to get crops to grow, and then drive the produce 1000 miles to ranches where livestock can survive the weather. If the people with guns don’t sustain the people with know-how, they’re won’t be much of anything for anybody – including bullets to fire.

Given the prognosis, it seems better just to pull the covers over your head. I’m here to beg you not to. I’m actually going to go even further: I’m going to beg you to learn as much as you can about these impossible problems, because it’s only in understanding them at the finest level of detail that we can solve them.

But how, you ask? Well, now you’re going to have to have some faith.

For a long time, you probably were told that space was empty. We now know that isn’t true: it’s filled with something called dark energy. As I understand it, dark energy is a kind of foam lattice. It’s not completely solid; spirits can slip around in it. Spirits that fight for possession of things (you know, bodies and material goods) tend to just push the foam around without gaining any advantage over it. Spirits that commit themselves to mutual benefit, however, end up building energy in the fabric of space. Think of these bundles of spirit like water in a pressurized bladder. That energy is available for us to do work on the world around us. As it’s been accumulating for billions of years, it’s a substantial asset.

It’s not easy to turn that energy to destructive purposes, because the will of all the contributors to the reservoir works against its misallocation. In fact, in the primitive psychological conditions that rule Darwinian evolution, one aspect of building such reservoirs is the presence of guardians that prevent abuse. Pain and suffering pollute the reservoirs, which motivates the guardians to move the energy into safer locations.

These reservoirs exist, but they don’t have any specific purpose. Humanity has intelligence to successfully focus that energy in the service of all living things. That reduces pain and suffering, which brings the reservoirs more directly under our control, as well as enabling them to be refueled by healthy ecosystems.

I keep on telling people that there’s far more energy available to us than we require to solve the problems we face – it’s just that we’re not trusted to us it. Part of being trusted is to “pick up your cross” as Jesus did: to enter into the pain of the world so that we can diagnose its specific illness, and then commit every fiber of our bodies to channel energy for healing.

It starts with faith, faith swells into hope, hope rises into commitment, commitment is channeled to produce knowledge, knowledge focuses power, and power enables healing.

Now the scientists will tell you that this is all hooey: if there were spirits, they would have seen them. My response is: well, if a scientist told you that he wanted to take your brain apart so that he could understand your personality, would you submit to it? How about even a few neurons? Scientists understand things by taking them apart. If you had the choice to run away, would you submit? And after you did, what would it take to convince you that it was safe to come back?

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you Jesus.

The Most Painful Choice a Woman Can Face

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My introduction to the trauma of unwanted pregnancy occurred one night when the women of our household disappeared at dinner time. I discovered them clustered in the front doorway, speaking quietly in frightened tones. A girl had gone to Mexico and not come back. When I asked my god-sister why she had gone there, I was told because she was afraid to tell her parents that she was going to have a baby.

Abortion is a procedure that yields no victors, only victims. For that reason, debating the matter yields no winners. But it’s important that the debate not be grounded in the evasion of lies, fear and death, but in the pursuit of truth, hope and life. So I’m going to offer my understanding of the issues from that second perspective.

Life is the integration of matter and spirit. I’ve participated more than once in the consummation of that binding during pregnancy, and it doesn’t necessarily occur at conception. Only a mother can be certain when the binding happens, and I would hope that makes a huge difference to her.

The nature of the spirit that is carried is important. We don’t fret too terribly much when a surgeon divorces us from cancerous tissue and the destructive spirit it anchors. In that light, insisting that a woman carry to term a baby that was forced into her by rape seems to be cruel. Similarly, the spirit of a child that gestates in a substance abuser might deserve relief from a toxic environment.

Does that mean that the infant spirit is guaranteed to depart following surgical removal of the fetus? Not necessarily. The womb is designed to anchor an infant’s spirit as much as to nurture its body. Of course, pregnancy isn’t necessary for a lady to suffer from spiritual pollution of the womb. I have rescued a young woman ruined by a single night of casual sex with a destructive man.

Cleaning up that kind of mess is done most effectively by offering the infant spirit a better alternative. Sometimes that is as simple as pointing out where other opportunities lay, but may include suggesting that it will have a better life if it hangs around until the mother gets into a stable relationship with a supportive and loving father. Such post-pregnancy tenancy happens more often than one might imagine, particularly when the mother desires to have a baby at some point in her life. Surgical abortion isn’t the only cause: 60% of all pregnancies abort spontaneously.

I’m the result of a union with such a hanger-on, who sits on my right shoulder. He came into the world to help me with a problem I’ve had in past lives. When somebody offered to remove him for me, I felt rather a sense of gratitude that God had provided me with such a companion. When a woman is too weak to resist the sexual demands of predatory males, she might find a similar benefit to have parts added until she develops the strength to say “no.”

That summarizes the theory and personal practice. What about Biblical injunctions? This is tendentious. In Genesis we are enjoined to “be fruitful and multiply”, but Jesus obviously didn’t feel a need to pursue that practice, and offered women non-traditional roles in his ministry. We should also not overlook the holy favor showed to Perpetua of Carthage, a mother still breast-feeding when she was martyred for her faith. Clearly the purpose of women in God’s plan goes beyond child-bearing.

“Thou shalt not kill” is also frequently invoked, but that’s not entirely consistent with the rest of the Judaic Law, which commands capital punishment for a number of offenses, including occupancy of a coveted territory or unrecognized Messiah-hood (the offense that allowed the Savior to prove his divinity). You can’t ignore the Father’s flexibility on this point. The inconsistency is resolved in Jesus’s observation that “all the law hangs” on love of the Father and our neighbors. That suggests that everything else in the law is conditioned upon circumstances.

So where, vis-à-vis abortion, does that leave us as Christians?

Well, first, we must invest in ensuring that women understand the sacred nature of their wombs. This goes well beyond motherhood. The womb is a place for the binding of spirit to matter, and that skill can be projected into the outer world as well. For this reason, Daniel 11:37 foretells the Messiah as “the one desired by women.” To anyone that has seen what happens to a woman when she is offered love to bind to the world, that obviously isn’t limited to emotional yearning. When a women uses her skill to bring unconditional love (which is Christ, of course) to a hungry world, the world vibrates with joy all through her. Yes, it’s incredibly sexual, and if we encouraged women to accept that joy then maybe they wouldn’t be so willing to let boys make a mess in them.

When we fail to encourage women to bind themselves fully to the unconditional love that is their due, well, they are going to face temptation, and some of them will submit. What happens in the eventuality of an unwanted pregnancy is between the mother, the infant spirit, and God. Whether a surgeon is involved or not is really incidental: a spiritually potent woman can manage the process without medical assistance. Among those not so gifted, some will find themselves encouraged to carry the baby to term by a supportive community, and some will be so enamored of the infant soul that they will bring the baby to term against all obstacles. Our job as Christians is to ensure that every expectant mother makes her decision in a supportive, loving environment. If she makes a choice that we disagree with, then our job is to provide love and counsel to help her heal and develop the strength to avoid a repetition of her error.

Under no circumstances should we use anger and shame to force an expectant woman into an outcome that she fears. For those that insist on that path: you assume the onus of ensuring that her child has all the advantages in life that yours do. After all, it was your will that brought the child into the world, so it’s really your child.

What about the innocent victim, the wounded infant spirit? That can be subtle. I knew a man with a really complex sexual identity. He served in the Navy for a number of years, and once spontaneously deciding to dress up in drag just before leaving port, creating a real stir on the aircraft carrier as the men raced about looking for a female stow-away. I ultimately came to understand that he was chaperoning the spirit of the daughter that he had sworn to protect, and who had clung to him in a past life as they perished in a shipwreck. She needed this life with him to restore her trust in living.

I could go on with examples, but the point is: don’t focus on how terrible the experience was, reach out to the infant’s spirit and show them how beautiful life can be. Don’t let them be trapped with someone not mature enough to raise a child. Open your heart to them, and help them find a home in a community that knows how to love.

You see, the moment of death really isn’t so long as compared to the span of our living. Dying is something that we suffer again and again. What’s important is that in each dying we come closer, step by step, to a life filled with loving.

We Can’t Say ‘Thanks’ Enough

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Life is the opportunity to participate in organizing spirit. Our bodies escort them about in clouds, and as we move amongst each other they enter into new relationships. Some of these are wonderful experiences: “Love at first sight” is a good example. Some of them are horrifying: consider the records of the carnival atmosphere at a public lynching.

At the core of our primary personality is a set of spirits that manage our survival. Through the mechanisms of our glands, organs, muscles and nerves, they coordinate the biological functions that allow us to control the world around us, and thus to sustain life. For most of the history of life on earth, this was as far as it went. Innovation in the integration of body and spirit was controlled largely by survival. With humanity, however, the possibilities exploded – almost without check. Using the mechanism of our brain, in each life we can explore and evaluate millions if not billions of spiritual relationships. We call these ideas.

How do we know which ideas work? Well, we put them into action. We seek to describe sources of pain (weather, natural disasters, disease and predators) and to create the means to avoid pain. We attempt to deny resources to those that bring us fear, or perhaps even better to use fear to take control of their resources. We gather and offer gifts to the people we love, when before we might have shared them more widely.

In the course of taking these actions, we integrate ideas into our core personalities. This can have terrible consequences for our bodies. If we accept a destructive idea, it can turn on us. Our core personality intuitively seeks to isolate its effects, but that may then cause stroke or cancer.

The other option is to vent destructive ideas on the people around us. For destructive ideas, that can be a successful strategy. One powerful individual can infect an entire society (witness Adolf Hitler, Mao TseDong, and Josef Stalin). In doing so, however, those ideas have to fight against the enormous mass of human experience, which proves that most of us survive best when we invest in the survival of others. The common man’s experience of the power of loving dilutes and even ennobles (see prior post) destructive behaviors.

In the beatitudes, Jesus promises solace to those that suffer most from this process. Implicitly, however, he also singles out those that serve most effectively in furthering its conclusion.

The poor in spirit – To be poor is often to be weak, but most directly what it means is to be missing something that you need. The poor in spirit need to be filled, and the world all around them offers them a multitude of destructive alternatives. To remain poor is to preserve yourself for occupancy by constructive ideas. Thank-you for your steadfastness.

Those who mourn – To mourn is to affirm the value of what is lost. This is not just the body of those that are lost to destructiveness, but the relationships that they offered us. In mourning, we preserve those relationships in our mind, and thus transfer to our care the souls that once found a home with the one mourned. Thank-you for your hospitality.

The meek – When we suffer a wrong, we often wish to lash out in revenge. The meek chose to suffer patiently. They do not propagate destructiveness, but struggle against it internally. In the course of that struggle, they transform it. Thank-you for your courage.

Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – To establish complete control, destructive ideas need to isolate their victims, making it appear that the acceptance of destruction is the only option available. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness raise their voice in warning and offer hope to victims. They encourage them to organize in support of each other. Thank-you for your witness.

The merciful – A person raised up in love often struggles when confronted with a destructive relationship. They may make regrettable choices, such as that made by Cain. Mercy recognizes this, offers wise counsel, and supports the wrong-doer as they seek to heal themselves and their victims. Thank-you for your compassion.

The pure in heart – From the perspective of Jesus, a pure heart can only be a heart filled with unconditional love. As unconditional love seeks to enter all things, a pure heart is an infectious agent. It embraces destructive relationships and transforms them. Thank-you for your service.

Peacemakers – The peacemaker enters into a destructive relationship and offers peace to both sides. In offering respect and affirmation to both parties, s(he) creates a common experience of beneficial relation. When the warring parties finally accept that commonality, they have the opportunity to recognize that the energies that they have committed to mutual destruction can be liberated for mutual benefit. Thank-you for your persistence.

The persecuted – When a strong personality stands up for love, the forces of destruction rank against them. This is terrifying, but because the power of divine love stands with them, the persecuted person is not easy to destroy. The attentions of destructive personalities are distracted, which allows their victims to rally and heal. Thank-you for your light.

In Jesus’s name: thank-you, thank-you, a million times thank-you.

All the Vice of Jesus

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Proponents of chaos theory love the story of the butterfly in Kansas. The butterfly flaps its wing, and a bird misses its prey. The bird banks, and in banking cools a column of hot, rising air. That decreases the pressure ever so slightly at higher elevation, which causes a slight change in the direction of a breeze. That breeze joins with a northerly gust along the coast, rather than merging with a sea-going breeze. That sea-going breeze then isn’t powerful enough to prevent the formation of a wind vortex in the Gulf Coast, and so a hurricane is born.

Does the butterfly “cause” the hurricane? No way in hell. A hurricane is enormously powerful, and the energy it contains must be dissipated somehow. All the butterfly does, in combination with a huge number of other actors, is influence the place and time of its occurrence.

Our lives are much like that. We have a primary personality, the personality welcomed by our mother and united with our body during gestation, but around us swirl other personalities, many without bodies. Because people have powerful tools, these spirits, ranging along the spectrum from angels to demons, seek to influence us in an attempt to improve their habitat.

Imagine your body as a nectar. Like hummingbirds and butterflies, an entourage of souls surrounds you. Sometimes we blow the sweet zephyr of peace, but when the wings flap the wrong way, we become the gale of rage. Just as in the warm, steamy air of the Gulf, the greater the power stored inside of us, the harder it is to maintain control.

When you meet with someone else, your entourage mixes with theirs. You have a relationship. Sometimes that meeting is a struggle for control. It can be a war, which is what I often see happening between men and women when I go out dancing at a nightclub. In other situations, it can be a creative celebration, which is why I love so much to dance to live music.

Over the centuries, humanity has developed some lore regarding the dynamics of our relationships. Certain types of spirits tend to generate constructive relationships. We call these virtues: patience, prudence, chastity and others. Some types of spirits cause destructive relationships. We call these vices: sloth, greed, and lust are examples.

Now the advice of most religions is to surrender the vices and assemble virtues. The ascended personality seems to be above it all. They are free from petty human concerns. In the extreme, they go without food or clothing. The spirits that surround them provide them all the sustenance they need. What we have to ask about such people, though, is this:

Are they really still alive?

The gift of having a body is to have the ability to reorganize spirits. In the way that we touch and speak, through the things that we eat and drink, even in the way that we walk and gesture: everything that we do involves mixing of the spirits that surround us, whether consensual or coerced. (Yes, that is why it is called intercourse.)

Here, then, is the greatness of Jesus’s ministry. He didn’t surrender his vices. He suffused them with love, and so transformed them from destructive to constructive influences.

If greed is the desire to accumulate wealth, when mixed with love it becomes a restless seeking to find the place where we can create the greatest value. It was this seeking that took Jesus away from Nazareth, where he received no honor, to Jerusalem.

If pride leads us to undervalue the contributions of others, with love it becomes enthusiasm for the things that we do well. It was enthusiasm that led Jesus to surround himself with people and share the skills he had in loving.

If sloth is an attempt to acquire resources without effort, when mixed with love it becomes a surrender to the caring of others when we can no longer care for ourselves, and thus to give the affirmation of our gratitude. It was with this surrender that Jesus affirmed the woman that came to anoint him, holding her dearer than the men that called him to greater nobility.

If lust is the desire to reside always in those sensations that give us pleasure, when mixed with love it becomes passion for the source of that sweet stimulus, and thus a willingness to pour out our strength in service to its existence. It was this willingness that led Jesus to the cross, where he poured his blood out for humanity and the world.

This is the greatness of his Abba: by its nature, unconditional love doesn’t choose. It seeks for all things to manifest themselves in greatness.

The greatness of a spirit is evidenced by the willingness of other spirits to associate with it. How much faster can the eagle of passion fly than the worm of lust can wriggle? It is because passion is welcomed by the recipient that it moves so freely, while lust must push through against resistance.

So the call of Jesus is not to stop being human. It is rather to surrender to the yoke of love, and enter into the greatness of your humanity.

The Solution to Sin

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The Bible documents the human struggle with sin. It begins with Cain, who was forgiven for slaying his brother, and ends with Jesus, who forgave those that placed him on the cross. In between, we have a number of object lessons in failure. Each intermediate step serves the divine purpose in preparing human nature for the manifestation of Christ, but each step hits a dead end.

Each of these stages presents sin in terms that reflected the mechanisms used to control its expression. Prior to Noah, sin was a violation of intimacy with God – a choosing to seek our own path in the world, and thus to allow external influences (the serpent or the presence “crouching at the door”) into the sacred relationship. With Moses, sin took on a legalistic tone: only a chosen few were allowed into the divine presence, and forgiveness was something bought by sacrifice. With entry to the Holy Land, the sin of placing temporal over spiritual authority led to the destruction of the nation.

By Jesus time, the existence of sin among the people had become a profit center for the priesthood. For most, redemption was out of reach. The priesthood had built a wall of shame against divine forgiveness. The mantra of that era would have been “sin sells.”

What is wrong with this picture? If the divine presence is unconditional love, then its goal upon encountering sin must be to bring healing. If we are preconditioned to believe that we are unworthy of receiving the divine presence, our free will prevents us from accepting healing. Thus Jesus died “for the forgiveness of sins.” Not forgiveness by God, who understands our frailty and always forgives us, but forgiveness of ourselves so that we may receive healing.

As humans, though, we know that when we receive power, of which healing is a form, we consider it to be part of us. If we do not forgive each other, we turn that power against those that have wronged us in the past, and perpetuate sin and so wound ourselves again. We take unconditional love and use it to create harm! So the next step is for us to forgive each other. In doing so, we allow the lessons of the past to be carried into the future. We prevent sin, not by regulating against it or creating fear of it, but by giving strength to those that have sinned so that they can heal themselves and make better choices in the future.

This is the path of Christ. This is what it means to “take up your cross and follow me.”

Are we there yet? No. It takes a lot of strength to make the choice: “Sin against me so that I may infect you with my compassion. Force your will upon me and find the divine presence of healing.” But when enough of us do, he returns, not to pass judgment, but to work his healing upon us and bring us home.

Perfect Love, Imperfect Justice

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Seeking fuel for criticism of religion, there is no better place to look than the old testament. When presented the contrast between the simple message of forgiveness in the New Testament and the corporal punishments of Leviticus, the best I have been offered is the tortured logic that “Christ’s sacrifice satisfied the desire of God for perfect justice.”

The contradictions in this message drove me from Christianity. Perfect justice? Dear God, who created us, with all of our flaws and weakness? What right has our maker to pass judgment on us?

To the atheist, these debates lack any merit. The books of the Bible are clearly an amalgamation of myths and histories from different cultures and eras. What kind of consistency would we expect to find?

But to the fundamentalist, these are central issues. If murder is justifiable in the eyes of the Lord, then there are principles that justify state-sanctioned execution, and even warfare. More moderately, social repression of “deviant” behaviors has a holy sanction, regardless of the psychological and political consequences to the oppressed class.

As I implied, resolving this contradiction was critical to the acceptability of Christianity in my mind. Given the obvious justification of the atheist’s position, I was ultimately astonished that there should be any coherence in scripture as I sought through it for answers to the problem. That coherence I found is evidence that the work of Divine Love on human nature involves transfers of focus from one culture to another as the opportunity best presents itself to heal our separation from the Almighty.

Let us trace the history of justice since that separation was first recognized. It begins with fratricide, a crime certainly more horrific than adultery, for which Leviticus demands death. What was the response of the Divine to that act? Not murder, but banishment. Not rejection, but protection.

What is the purpose of this program? As God had counseled Cain earlier “Evil crouches at your door. But you can master it.” Cain lost that struggle with evil. His jealousy overcame him, and he murdered his brother. So God sends him away with his personal devil, knowing that the display of mercy and concern will give Cain strength as he struggles for the rest of his life to civilize the spirit that bound itself to him through his brother’s murder.

This is the work of an engineer, using humanity as a tool to heal brokenness in the realm of spirit.

Then we come to Noah and the flood. Here we see God, in an act of desperation, attempting to purge the world of human evil. Several historical events have been proposed as the precursor of this story: an asteroid impact, the release of flood waters from glaciers on the Asian steppes, and rising sea levels fed by Ice Age melt that eventually flooded continental shelves. There seems to be no lack of material mechanisms to explain the myth, but this doesn’t let God of the hook: why didn’t He intervene to remove His creatures from the path of destruction?

The simple answer is that nobody was listening. But God still regrets the consequences, and this is central to the thread of the history of justice in the Bible. He announces that no longer will He intervene to dispense justice over men – the cost to the rest of reality is too great. From this point forward, men will maintain their own courts of justice.

In this context, the words of Jesus take on a different weight. Asked to identify the commandments, he replies “Love thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul. And love thy neighbor as thyself. All the rest of the law is derived from these.” But derived by who? Clearly, in the post-flood context, by men. Elsewhere, Jesus asserts “I came not to overthrow the law, but to restore it.” Reading his proclamations and efforts to the reclamation of sinners, clearly Jesus is referring to the law of unconditional love that granted mercy to Cain.

The Law of the Torah is a human construct, serving human ends, motivated by divine principle, but expedient where human patience reaches its end. Jesus did not die to satisfy a Divine need for Perfect Justice. He died and rose again to demonstrate the imperfection and ineffectuality of human justice, and give us the courage to struggle against the tyranny of misguided enforcement.

In the end, then, there are no just wars, because wars perpetuate and strengthen the spirit of violence. There is no just persecution, because persecution always separates us from those that we are intended to heal. Any pronouncements to the contrary contradict the teachings and acts of Jesus. They are not the teachings of Christianity.