We the great judges of one another

How are we supposed to access where we presently are? With our general baring's in life how can we know with clarity where we really are in life? Where the earth is? that we’re thinking right about the truth? If we are a judgmental or ego driven person we might be self-assured enough in our personal behavior and baring's through life in the world to expect from all others a direct correlation to our own imperfect conclusions and behavior. We would expect everyone else’s life decisions and behaviors to be in line conveniently with our own personal beliefs. We might think we are close enough to perfection that we can naturally expect it then from all others as we judge the world. The others usually do ultimately fail to meet our judgment of acceptance and basically that’s how the human mind works in society. We are all judges and attackers of one other.

 

Do not judge. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you.

 

The individual regardless where he or she lives, don’t you agree, that they seem to face invisible boundaries in their walk through the world. The boundaries we must delicately maneuver past we maneuver by hopefully not self-destructing or hurting others. With temperament, hurt feelings, our sensitivity to others behavior, pride, lust, anger etc. they all make our own instincts potentially dangerous. To live is like walking through a mine field as we navigate this life.  Often what is lacking in our experience is the available ideas to morally guide us and to shape our decisions at key moments especially.

 

We must be given over to the notion first of all that listening to things like compassion or forgiveness etc. is beneficial to us. There is a rebellion in the human appetite that acts against these good ideas and so this rebelliousness must be resisted and the right thinking must be discovered. Lacking in our circumstances and situations are the knowledgeable councilors with those good arguments and examples. There are no great guide signs big enough in life, or posted everywhere, that are clear enough, universal enough and that can be thought about in our imperfect lives with our roaming and agitated minds. In life we all cross boundaries therefore stepping into wrongful places in our imagination, with me my past has had violence.

 

Many of us must consider the church as a potential guide to be a place of old fashioned Bible hymns. Old Testament myths are read there and then great leaps of correlation are drawn between the message and some moral message for our own time. Illusions in those who are regular in attendants might perceive themselves morally upright and perhaps what is unrecognizable at first about them is self-righteousness and hypocrisy. The Gospels themselves containing the story of Jesus and His teaching is incredibly helpful to a troubled mind while the darkness in the Church in some circles these days routinely seems to reveal real evil to consider. The evil festers and remains there out of sight while the hope that is the Church is supposed to guard against this evil but is yet to realize it.

 

Healthy desire, fantasy, sex shouldn't make people with an eye on God ashamed or guilt ridden or afraid of losing His friendship because of it. Why should these ideas that occur billions of times a second to everyone, every human being in the world, be a source of shame or create such guilt? If God exists not only is He aware of the thoughts but He engineered and designed them. He knows therefore  how sex would occur and be imagined through our thoughts the positions we imagine, situations etc. Nothing about thinking about adult sex is alien to God. If He is God He knows every thought we have and He is not surprised by us at all. The dusty Hymn books in a Church and the illusion there that people don’t or shouldn’t masturbate, for example, might be the thing about religion that isn’t attractive or realistic or healthy for people who need Gods friendship but are turned off by the mood of the building.

 

I don’t think the world offers a clear road forward. None of us, however close to the truth we may be, can walk down a clear path here in this life. What lies ahead of us will involve suffering, trauma, despair, grief while many of us will encounter overwhelming misery and then eventually death will come. The road, path, that all human beings follow offers no guarantee we'll find hope or experience much or any love. Chance itself may torment us and take us by famine or war or a car accident or a plague. For much of history people didn't live long lives to begin with.

 

Out of this chaos culture, family, entertainment, religious community, good ideas, forms of hope itself have interacted and fought for an influence in the world. Many greater minds have come closer then others to that kind of hope. Some of them have claimed to have a friendship with a force of good they claimed to know personally that transcends us. I believe in that God existing as we live our lives in this world.

 

Whatever life gives if there is a God He is the author of time. What seems to be a premature meaningless life in the hands of an eternal Being of unlimited creativity and compassion may prove not ultimately to be an ending that is as tragic as what it seems to be. This life here now is a glimpse of a longer experience and being absent God on earth is to be with God after life on earth and there is no comparison between them. Perfect peace, endless joy, no more pain, no more death, that’s what I look for.

 

But can we abandon the idea that we can know "the truth" as an absolute here? I don’t think all of us, half of us, or one percent of us, can know the truth by pulling ourselves up by our own boot strings in life. Even if southern Baptist evangelicals who take every word of scripture as literal history have it right how many of us can reasonably come to appreciate that? We can't know the truth in totality we are too doctrinally challenged on this planet. The mathematical probability, possibility, that while people interact with extreme social, cultural, religious diversity that they all make a sudden change to one hundred percent acceptance of a certain preachers ideas is impossible.

 

The ancient myths convince us of the "truth!"  *rolls his eyes* Alternatively supposedly the lengthy atheist accounts of evolving account of events through time can maneuver our understanding back with total consistency and absolute accuracy to the very "first causes" of everything without error or unforeseen circumstance. In these accounts supposedly they eradicate for us the need for explanations of "why?" or "What could have came before that?" that could open the door to larger possibility. Also while looking out to the ends of the Universe it leads to the questioning which asks "What lies beyond the edges of the Universe itself?”

 

These are all like myths, it seems to me, when we tell ourselves they represent the absolute truth. They are only masquerading in our appreciations as pure knowledge. The claims we human beings have discovered “already” somehow these very mysteries and know the truth from our deductions absolutely is misleading. The world, the Universe, the unknown all around us, is supposedly by some of these supposed “certainties” to be clearly distinguishable now somehow as Godless.

 

We will accept all of the beliefs we have, no matter what they are, out of desperation or because they appear familiar. Some ideas sooth our mood and give the greatest comfort to our minds intellectual foundations. We are ideologically challenged and disadvantaged. I will give you a greater truth. "We don't yet know the truth."

 

We should humble ourselves therefore and have understandings for the alternative perspectives in life in this world. Can we open our minds to humanity despite the doctrines that persuade us personally. Can we look for hope itself as something real existing beyond our state of bewilderment here while doing it?

 

I pity the poor ideological struggles that living in the world produces. Why on Earth are people so determined to judge and condemn what isn't their own experience. Aren't all human beings hindered by the same inaccurate understanding of the truth.

 

Why not love the total humanness of every last person swayed by ideas and ideology on Earth. Whatever doctrine moving with the wind that is persuading us can’t we resist allowing it to make us so terribly afraid.

 

My belief of God is that He is a God of compassion and love. His love transcends therefore the suspicion that is afraid of the different kinds of thinking that are normal in a confusing world. Everyone is loved here by God.