“A Rant” Read if you dare!

I’m a little tired of trying to sound like a big expert writer with my blog entry’s when I’m really not. There are so many people, including many people on Facebook, who write really well compared to me. I’m an amateur writer and choose to write mostly  because it helps organize my thoughts but also because I’ve learned that it helps me think through more possibilities in the pursuit of knowledge. Writing is really a form of thinking and so the process has added some complexity to my views of life in this way. I write like an authority but I really have no authority just arguments and observations I like to think matter. 

For much of my adult life I’ve admired the honest evangelist Billy Graham. I would watch his televised addresses broadcast from baseball stadiums across the world and I had a collection of tapes of His religious gatherings that had beautiful singing, testimonies, and Billy preaching the word of God. In my twenties I would drink beers watching the tapes when I was alone and seeking much needed spiritual support and uplift in my life. Billy called on the enormous audiences before him to come forward and accept Jesus Christ into their lives. He would quote the Bible telling his audience: “You must be born again of the Spirit”.

I really admired Billy and I myself believe in the actual historical existence of a figure known as Jesus Christ. What has changed for me somewhat is greater knowledge of the world and of history.

The more I’ve had time to think over the years the more I’ve dared asked myself and God some questions. One question I’ve felt compelled to ask is why would this existence be such an unfair place when it came to the experiential chances, and therefore limited opportunity, to hear such a message preached by Billy Graham in order to be saved. Why would so many of us in this life therefore have no fair potential at reaching the saving ideas said to be our only hope beyond this world.

I wonder why the rules of existence would be so unfair like this. Why would God and His created universe calculate terms that the odds of humanity finding hope were odds this desperate and this hopeless a picture for so many.

Multitudes of people, accordingly if such terms are correct, will perish from the odds allowed by those conditions of experience and opportunity. Such reasoning only allows safe passage to a narrow few out of so many other billions of lost souls in life. Such thinking suggests that God demands from us that we must know certain doctrine accurately but doctrine outside many of our human experiences in this world to know.

People fearfully cling to their Bible’s and recite word for word assertions based on, according to them, a flawless literally interpreted word of how history supposedly, word for word, literally happened too.

This is a dangerous life when it comes to physical survival and the ideas human beings dabble in. This life is even more dangerous then we think. If what these systems of thought to date, engineered into concepts, various persuasions, antidotes, and truth claims, are totally correct, word for word in their claims, we all are facing even far worse danger then we could ever of foresaw in our more rosy care free moments of joy. For if ideology in life must be sorted through for explanations of hope and if out of that journey one specific ideology, of so many, must be adopted, and this is how humanity will be determined a fate in the afterlife, then we the sifters, the simple, navigating, error finding persons in this confusing world, best hope we somehow, by rather feeble odds of hope for many of us,  grasp unto the right ideological antidote for hope. We better secure for ourselves that arbitrary antidote wisely otherwise we'll go elsewhere then somewhere pleasant with multitudes of other abandoned human beings running along with us.

 

With so many ideas confusing us, them being diverse and distinct from each other, with them moving across language, culture, tradition, being shaped by histories of family genealogy, then, within this smorgasbord of truth claims and claimed certitudes that are all wrestling for our agreement, is this how God really will unevenly award out rewards and punishments? If this is how it is, this gloom and doomsday calling we are asked to accept on planet Earth, and our hope really only wrests in a minority of voices who stumble into a stadium and hear a charismatic evangelists message being motivated to disturb us into repentance then how is this a fair world for many.

 

While such weak voices make such proclamations into the wind billions of other people, many decent people in India, China, Africa, Indonesia, Iran,  slink off into the sunset of their graves void of this antidote that might of offered them this saving grace.

 

We are in one desperate pickle if God isn’t fairer then we are and we should tremble and shake and let our despair overwhelm us for keeps because life is one strange experiment then.

Why would there be an inferno like punishment of hell for doctrinal incompatibility also when our inadequate discovery of another mans truth is so common to the human condition that it leads mankind to reach many different unavoidable conclusions in how we see the world in order to believe the different ideas that we do.

I still admire Billy and I still believe that Jesus Christ was crucified in history and died for our sins but I have not succumb to accepting that the downfall of most of humanity is included within that saving plan of love.

To add to my confusion of life a full scale Noah's Ark attraction and theme park opened on July 7, 2016 in northern Kentucky. This ark is constructed with the dimensions described in the Bible in the book of Genesis. Visitors to this ark can see life size models of animals such as elephants, unicorns, komodo dragons and velciraptors.

Even though the book of Genesis in the Bible says the Earth is only 6,000 years old the museum claims that there were still dinosaurs less then 6,000 years ago and that they coexisted with people of Bible times in the period of Noah. The museum offers no explanations of how the dinosaurs then went extinct.

I watched the documentary on this Noah’s Ark museum on PBS which had classrooms within the museum that school children visiting the ark daily filled by the hundreds each hour of the day. They teach the children there how dinosaurs were among the creatures to have survived the flood by being permitted access to ride on the giant ark with all the other kinds of animals.

Apparently, for size and space issues however, the dinosaurs were conveniently baby dinosaurs. This all explains then the archeological evidence of dinosaurs while the earth can still be said to really be only 6,000 years old supposedly anyway. I’m left with a reaction to these claims that for me has me feeling a far greater skepticism then  merely having just plenty of uncertain doubts.

On the other side of looking at belief in life is the view that religion or the idea of God is an absurd one. Such human claims of knowledge assert to have a grasp on everything relevant about the world’s mysteries in this way enough so to put God and questions of meaning to rest that look to the unknown for a form of superior life.  This form of atheistic belief explains for us then, supposedly adequately enough, our meaning when it comes to these unknowns, or ultimately our lack of meaning as we will die and cease to exist.

I wonder myself however if it could be possible that we haven't gathered half, or even a few, of the pieces to this puzzle as of yet in order to put them together right. Can the truth in our current understanding of our existence remain vastly incomplete and inadequately resolved. Could the real overarching truth of existence mysteriously still exist as a mystery beyond our present imaginations capacity to understand it.

Maybe then truth isn't all neatly described and laid out by our proud human knowledge claims on both sides. Could it be not only probable but extremely likely that we don't know where we are in the firmament of the infinite sky?

My view of humanity now isn't tribal like it was before so my views have changed in this way too. I don't mistakenly desire to look suspiciously and with hostility towards outsiders beyond the border of my own country. I'll only be on this hostile earth a short while with all the conflict here. Many people in this world will spend their lives justifying hatred and producing in familiar packs selfishness that looks outward and casts blame on others. I choose in my beliefs to unapologetically try and care about people everywhere regardless if their ideas align with my beliefs or even my interests.

 

I'm only human so yes if some ISIS fanatic picked up a knife and sliced off my hand I'd have to abandon my attempt to try and have love for them in that instance. Yet really the view that all humanity is loved and matter, as hard as at times I might try to care in this way and can’t, is how I think God really feels about humanity.

 

People can and will invent all the corrosive, hateful, fanatical, division creating ideas they can indoctrinating the sponge like audiences who are willing to soak it up because minds love a good hate. Despite this truth though when you show hatred you aren't really doing what is ultimately right or what really matters in this life in my opinion. You’re acting in ways I believe that don’t understand that love is what governs everything around us and so you miss life’s real terms and the ultimate picture.

 

You might say fuck that nonsense I don’t believe that. What If however you could have love to be real, as being what overarches everything in life, would you permit it if you were the one to choose if it was allowed or would you rather the way it is now in a divided judgmental world. Would you rather hold unto the idea of this divided world, a world ultimately with no future hope or purpose, a world where every common man is a great angry judge of his neighbor.

 

Many people I think would prefer this later option because they’d rather an imperfect love in the world that was simply on their terms is the sad truth of human belief.

 

When we judge each other we don't usually have a coherent explanation of people’s history and that personal histories effects on the persons thought nor do we have any general or adequate insight into the reality of most other people’s lives. The challenges the human race therefore faces, and has faced since civilization began, means that human lives have always been in a state of real ignorance the majority of the time wherever they sat and analyzed their surroundings and wherever they struggled in their behavior toward each other.

 

What we have in our knowledge when we judge each other is only little bits and pieces of the puzzle strewn together into an argument that feels good. Our judgment secures and justifies ourselves and our need to be right and justified in who we are in a self serving way by pursuing our own self interest.

 

I think we take delight ranting and raving at other people who we think are deserving of our condemnation from our belief we have great understanding and righteousness. For all the injustice and calamity in the world we get to remain pure, innocent and self-righteously right in condemning each other.

 

What this kind of world view misses, at least one important thing it misses, is that real love for people understands instead that people in their numerous states of ignorance and error have no real vision to find their way out of error a great deal of the time.

 

If God is just and fair and loving I can't see Him sifting through all humanity, across all cultures, and assigning blame ruthlessly and then excluding from Heaven, callously, the people who are really beautiful, even when misguided, everywhere in this world regardless what ideas exist there where they live.

 

How, for instance, can a young mind in this world know what's in his or her best interest most of the time. That mind inevitably will find the material unavoidably, in the form of persuasive thought, that is nearest to that persons life, and it will, regardless of it’s value, present itself to them in charismatic form. The guided person in life then won't know how to overt their eyes from the ideas in this innocence and so the older teachers will profit from their vulnerability. Like parasites the idea deliverers act by offering no saving path to avoid any of this toxicity of thinking or ideology and even they usually don’t know any better themselves.

 

The mind of mankind will therefore unavoidably get poisoned in life and our minds are blank canvasses that need direction. You can't just fill a mind with any kind of garbage at all and expect people to be able to reason their way to peace and safety that's what we don't seem to understand. People are stewing in all kinds of ideas through their imagination without any real readable road signs, with no compelling councilor in sight, and succumbing to the worst of influences. So bad ideas lay dormant in the subconscious and within the imagination of people while in many societies throughout this world there is a stubborn unwillingness to help guide humanity by the right kind of teaching for them.

 

When we tell youth that Jesus, for instance, has no relevance, although His ideas really offer us life foundations for how to think healthily in our relationships, we fail them. We fail society because God taught the clearest way to non violence, forgiveness, and toward having real concern and compassion for our fellow man in a demonstration of real love.

 

I think that God exists and looks over all of us human beings with love. I believe that people in their fifties and sixties are still children in the eyes of God. I think that God sees how ideologies spread, knows how those ideas move, understands how susceptible to good and bad ideas we are in this world. I think He knows people fall innocently into error and that people judge error ruthlessly with severity but that those who judge are rarely fair within themselves.

 

I think God gets that multitudes in certain regions of earth will fight for meaningless causes, that regions of the planet will know different religions, and that people will make mistakes. Instead of God severely dividing up those with the right ideas, and casting away those with the wrong ideas, I suggest He as our God will be merciful, fair, and show who He is which is love. He will show us what is love fully revealed, not half-hidden, on a scale so mindboggling we can't even begin to fathom its possibilities for us.

 

When I did a study of history by watching Yale and other university lectures online I learned about Ancient Israel and about the Hebrew or Old Testament scriptures. As the professor went through the first part of the Bible as an historian, and not someone who takes literally accounts of talking donkeys, man eating fish, staves turning into snakes, parting red seas, Moses in a basket rescued from a river by Pharos daughter and etc. I took it all in and thought about what constitutes real knowledge.

 

I spent fifteen years learning of ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient Rome, then watching lectures on the middle ages, reading about Christian history, learning of the history of science and other subjects. I mention this to make the point that previously I had no thorough conception for how the world works before I did this study. I still don’t understand a lot about this world but what I did learn by this study is how humanity has always been searching for the truth.

 

You no doubt have heard of the Inquisitions. That was the Church cruelly responding to other ideas threatening their control of thought at the time. These ideas challenged the Church’s self-professed ownership of the right to truth. The punishments were severe too, disembowelments, torture wheels, people burned alive etc..

 

The Church thought it held the only claims that were to be permitted for human beings to think upon. Yet people, like in ancient Greece with men like Aristotle, and many others of every age, they kept pursuing truth. Those that came after them were other philosophers and future scientists who began cataloging nature, philosophizing about our moral rights, constructed political systems, and created rule of law. Such thinkers pursued many other endeavors too too numerous to list. Some thinkers tried to understand the celestial movements of planets in the galaxy and some thinking dared to question the absolute authority of the Bible as literal history or the earth as the center of the universe.

 

I don’t think this is bad at all even if you believe in God like I do. At least such developments of ideas in our history unfolding like this doesn’t have to be bad.  I think truth is something we as humanity have been on course to pursuing and desiring to figure out for a greater reason as far back as our history of ourselves allows us to look. This is why I don’t mind Darwinian evolutionists when their thought is on course in the pursuit of truth wanting to find it. I don’t feel hate or hostility toward people who say there is no God either. In my feeble opinion if humanity was all simply gullible enough to believe in floating arks filled with unicorns and dinosaurs we wouldn’t have much intelligence or much freedom at all to speak of.

 

Such thinking might fail to believe in God yes but to question the idea of there not being a God must be something God allows, if He exists, and that I suspect He finds unthreatening to Him unlike us who can feel greatly insulted and threatened by it.

 

As humanity we wonder about many different possibilities testing uncertainty with different preoccupations by searching and wondering about life’s mysteries in this world. All of us can wonder about life’s mysteries and puzzles by wondering where everything came from and where everything is going. We can ask what really is out there in the cosmos. What natural laws don’t we yet understand. What other life might exist and if we dare ask it if there is hope for us. We can ask can love account for more then merely being an evolutionary adaptation in emotion for social survival and we can ask could God exist giving our lives further future purpose and immeasurable joy.  

 

All through history people have asserted themselves to hold different ideas about our world with certainty. That has always meant that it has been in our nature to be miniature experts.

 

However much I may wonder about all this and try and remain open to different possibilities my trust returns again to my Lord as the figure of a compassionate and loving Jesus hanging on a Roman Cross. For me I really do believe He suffered and died for our sins. Yet I think Jesus was dying too for Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and Atheists and the entire world population.

 

When the scriptures were written the writers knew nothing of the world beyond that area of the Roman Empire and the area around ancient Israel. If they had written the Bible with the knowledge of our world we have now the pages would likely have been written very differently. This has to be perhaps because the Holy scriptures have human authorship as well as Gods hand in their creation. Imperfect people under Divine inspiration wrote the Bible over many years.

 

I choose to believe this myself and yet I don’t have a complete system of knowledge explaining history in order and completeness and I don’t think anyone does in completeness. We can argue like we have a full account for reality on earth so all history can be all summed up by us and so we can justify our beliefs in this way but in reality no human being can have all of that knowledge. I believe neither of us whether a scientist, a philosopher, a person of faith knows this mystery adequately enough to say absolutely what lies behind us, beyond us etc..

 

I don’t have a neat system therefore like some people that assert by those arguments to know that the obviously fictitious story’s of The Old Testament for instance, which I don’t take to be literal history, are, according to them, real history as it occurred. According to some people to not take everything literally in the Bible throws holes in everything else about God but I don’t believe that to be so. I don’t know if the story’s were allegory's but I choose to think they did come from divine inspiration in people’s lives searching for meaning.

 

Regarding the natural order around us here material particles in various configurations are said to be moving and reconfiguring in accordance with physical law. Philosophers in response have asked that if we assume that the series never had a beginning in time then why is there such a series when there might have been a different one or even a changeless void.

 

Matter too has, in infinite space with all it's unknowns, oddly created us people, constructed in us a complicated brain that curiously has a state of consciousness finding us in a somewhat knowing and observing state. The mental state we now know as living, self aware, conscious beings leads us to make some of our arguments for the existence of God from it. Some of our arguments are based on the demands of mortality, the existence of beauty, the normativity of human rationality, religious experience etc.

 

Life in this way is most interesting such as the desire we have to look outward and beyond us in the universe for clues of our existence. Will we discover other living beings out there somewhere. As we explore far back into our own past in history what might be found there. When we look into the nature of knowledge, its possibility, scope, and general bases where will it lead in our search for certainty in this life.

 

Out of history and the doctrines held absolutely to be real by the Church there came also arguably a healthy skepticism. This skepticism became prepared to consider the application of doubt even to oneself and not merely to other things until a solid criterion of truth can be produced and we aren’t there yet in this life.

 

Reading a little on metaphysics made me wonder upon ultimate reality recently and what really exists and what is it that distinguishes existence and makes it possible. Some of us search to find evidence that life has meaning and purpose after our death. But what an anomaly this existence is for us to be a part of all this life here, and maybe, it remaining yet to be revealed, perhaps fantastically, far greater unknown possibilities may await us.

 

Again this existence is a state where we have a consciousness curiously. The question could be then asked does our self-awareness in existence emerge from sheer random chance or for a larger purpose. Can we survive our death and find purpose in a future beyond our lives here and now. I believe that a future with God does exist for us and that even for skeptics and atheists that it’s premature of them to assume that there isn't something important to our being alive and that life doesn’t have something in store for our future. The survival of death would explain further our shared experiences, like the profound meaning we know and feel in the love we have for each other.

 

I think that I know there is something beyond us and it’s God.  He has a guiding hand in matter constructing the design or blueprint and complexity of us and our bodily systems and complex brains. He is responsible as well for the curios and wonderful natural environment we find ourselves surrounded by. So I think that there is something intrinsically valuable in the thought we now know and have freedom to use.

 

I often wonder why God would be threatened in His omnipotence by human freedom. He as God knows past, present and future and in this way therefore understands the course human beings will take across time in every intellectual investigation we undertake that searches for the truth. Will God condemn us for roads He no doubt prepared for us to wonder down.

 

I would like to state this also that I feel that many people in life would be truly kind, on a much larger scale, if they would only be allowed and presented with the right opportunity to be so. The chance rarely presents itself in life by opening up for us the opportunity for a seismic chance at real kindness in a kind action we can take.

 

If many people among us could be transported somehow to 1944 Auschwitz Germany to the concentration camps controlled by the Nazis what might that mean. If somehow the SS guards could become distracted and the people seeking kindness could offer the starving Jewish people there, women, men, old and young, heaping bowls of meat stew. If in these people’s hands now was the opportunity to see the suffering prisoners momentary joy and to feel their extreme gratitude in their malnourished state as they ate the food gratefully. If people could give the prisoners arm loads of loafs of fresh bread and also offer great sympathy and reassurances that the war would soon be over and that they’d be soon released how would showing that kind of love change them?

 

If we could love the people there in that awful place in history as human beings many many people would find such a personal opportunity like this for love, compassion, and kindness to be appreciated from them something deeply satisfying to their souls.

 

In that act of love there would be no doctrinal differences of ideas about who God is interfering in that concern for the prisoners because we'd simply be acting in a way, at least then in that situation, that we could now see was clearly intrinsically right and good. Such an obvious decision of how love works in this instance defies a need for an ideological correctness of belief in others and shows us love and how God really sees humanity I believe. The people in the concentration camp could just as easily have been Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or any other group and to show love would matter just as much.

 

This is love and this is who I think God really is. This is and how God will treat all of humanity not by our narrow road doctrines that look at humanity and have us figuring from our hardness of heart that only few persons of the human race will find Heaven. Love is the real language God deals in and we only understand it’s light before us dimly.

 

When I posted this argument in a chat room yesterday making reference to the concentration camp one reaction was voiced in reply particularly to it. The remark that was voiced basically said that “this world suffers from over population anyway”.

 

I guess I could interpret that unusual reaction to mean that feeding hungry people is a wasted action in a world of over population by this belief. I could maybe infer perhaps also that this person might see his own interests selfishly, with a self entitlement to his food, and with little empathy beyond his own immediate neighbors. Yet why do we here in North America consider ourselves by this kind of logic to be the one’s of the world who shouldn’t starve and that others in say Africa or India or China to be the one’s burdening the resources of the planet and not us equally so.

 

The people in all corners of this earth are as equally human as anyone  anywhere else. Yet national, racial, religious, cultural identities dissect that perspective alienating people from a belief in a shared equal humanity across the planet.

 

Religion can dissect humanity into distinctions reducing the dignity of other people. Patriotism does the same thing to our trust of others, our understanding, and our compassion toward them. I profess this to be an error most sinister if we think anything about other humanity other then in us trying to bridge our divide with these other people.

 

All people in general believe that God supports their country ahead of, or in spite of, the interest of others regardless which nation they live in. Monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Dictators all proclaim that God loves them and favors and supports them. It really doesn't matter to the people there therefore if their nations are Socialist, Communist, a Kingdom, or a Democracy because all believe the same thing and justify all kinds of actions, intentions and conduct in the belief their favored and more important then everyone else.

 

Finally our eyes and senses receive stimuli from the world and then our brain organizes that stimuli using language and constructing concepts.  Out of this process, commonly in human nature, the tendency we have in our thought, from it, is to judge others. In this way we unfortunately regularly judge each other very imperfectly.

 

As we judge others we seem to not perceive within ourselves, in our own minds, in how we form our own judgments our own great error. This error believes commonly enough in human nature that instead of being unjust in our indignation that we’re innocent and great in our views and opinions being justifiable authorities in our views of the value of other people.Through our indignant attitudes in judging we err greatly and all people at times of course do.

 

I think the tendency we have to err in judgment is an inherent and prevalent one in human nature. We might understand that a lot of other people have strange ideas and that often they are not simply just flawed but totally wrong. Yet we still live under the illusion that our own particular attitudes read and judge the world personally with flawless and accurate insight even when we condemn others self-righteously.

 

When judging others it isn’t the case however that we are justified in doing so. When we fail to see the worth of other people through our judgment of them and when we justify that we’re righteous and worth something more then someone else then we err. If who we speak angrily of isn’t worth anything then we’re greatly mistaken in our judgment of other people then.

 

I suggest that It's not just ok to love others everywhere but that it’s us with the greatest insight and understanding we can possess when we love all other people in this world regardless of what their ideological condition is.

Yet we can't ordinarily grasp this kind of universal all encompassing love when we see violent people or misunderstood other cultures. We see them instead as being without our own beliefs about ultimate truth of who God is for instance.

 

By showing an all inclusive love, however, it has an importance for our lives more real then the current distinctions we make through our own ideology lenses. This is true because it is really true that love is the ultimate transcending language governing all things in life. Love seen for all life everywhere deserves our true and real attention beyond our judgments of one another. Whatever systems of mistaken thought we may know in the human race as individuals or groups what it all comes down to is that we are all in various states of unavoidable error. We need to love the human person in spite of the moral or idea errors a person gets lost under the spell of in order for us to find real wisdom.

 

The darkness was strung by the stars and as I observed them I kept wanting to stop, and enjoy, and stare, and pray, but I was hurried instead to keep moving on. So I left the hollow under the moonlight. Then it was another time that I returned and came out under the stars again. I beheld this time that the canopy of Heaven was still there and so I murmured and prayed there in that valley beneath Heaven which I thought exploded in singing there in the weeping of the morning dew around me.

 

I realized then in an instant it could be counted on that nothing surpasses the greatness or the dignity of a human person. Human life, I clearly recognized, was not just an idea or an abstraction. Human life is the concrete reality of a being that is capable of love and this truth endures, this truth will not go away.

 

Truth I knew will not pass or change. I was therefore reassured to have no fear of moving into that unknown. I felt that God was with me and I understood I could step out fearlessly knowing that no harm can befall me, all is very, very well.

 

I then dreamed that night that I was in a dory rowboat and paddling across the tranquil, bottomless, star lit, cosmic oceans of Nova Scotia riding and rolling on the tides being there effected by gravity. I rolled there on the water somewhere between the planets and those great unseen ravines of silence out there. I was below the moon somewhere in that awesome emptiness.

 

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

 

1 John 4:7