"The Old Parson" A Short Story

I set out on a drive one evening after dinner, it was early September. I had no idea where I was planning to drive to that evening. I traveled under the overpass and down past the Pleasant Valley hillside taking note of where my father told me that my Grandfather had once had his farmstead when he was a child. I continued on from there traveling further along down the old rural country road.  

Rounding a turn near the Lafarge Cement Plant, which was next to the nearby Shorts Lake, I kept following the twisty road.  I soon had left my home village behind, which was an unpopulated little community. Soon I was driving into South Maitland, an even more remote place. 

South Maitland was a  community in the Municipal District of East Hants, Hants County, a place here in the province of Nova Scotia. I had heard that the area had been the site of a number of nineteenth century shipyards. Now the village was best known for an historic bridge built over the challenging tidal waters that crossed the Shubenacadie River. 

As I crossed over the large bridge I looked down and off into the distance waters with their distinctive mud color as I admired the distant views. I was leaving most signs of civilization behind me now the further I drove. 

I thought I knew that by continuing on now I’d be crossing into the interior spaces of the province. I noticed how I was surrounded by mostly rural farmland beside me. The interconnecting lonely roads interlacing the provinces interior were isolated roads traveling beside places that offered occasionally beautiful scenery and views. I traveled past farms, pasturelands and an occasional house dotting this lonely countryside around me.

Windsor and The Annapolis Valley lay on the rout ahead of me while other alternative routs connected to other roads and places with names like: The Rawdon Hills, Maitland and Elmsdale. The gentle warm breeze that evening came through the windows that were wide open in the car.   

Suddenly and very impulsively I decided to go off the beaten trail with a turn of the steering wheel. The lane I turned unto was paved but weather-beaten with ruts and warps in the aged pavement ahead. After a picturesque few miles driving then appearing there on my right, on the quiet road, I came upon an old abandoned Church sitting beside the road. I slowed down now out of curiosity to appreciate the old building. The grounds before the church were strewn with sticks and an overgrowth of entangled grass and weeds.  

I decided for an unknown reason to pull the car over there and shut off the engine. Sitting there in the silence I listened as birds sounded around me. The only  sound I heard other then bird song was the gentle wind coming in breezes that periodically picked up intensity with occasional gusts. I decided after a few minutes sitting in the quiet that I should get out and walk over toward the front of the old Church building.  

When I approached the church I could see that the woodwork of the building was old and rotting and that the doors were left to bang open and shut in the wind.  I marveled at the sight of this old place. I was in some almost nameless and unheard of place, well away from civilization, and here was this wonderful old church that I was able to picture as being a once vibrant place full of people.

 

I looked upward now as I pictured in my mind what once had been there. I noticed that the old bell tower was cracking in the old building while the rusty old bell had no rope. There was no way to call the flock to church now I guess I considered reflecting on history. I looked inside through the doors past the cobwebs strung between the doorjamb casing. The seats inside the Church were broken and splintered. The floorboards were soggy, sunken and rotten looking. The timber inside was all mildewed. With holes in the seats you couldn’t sit down or you’d fall through them.

 

Impulsively I walked inside through the front doors. Solemnly and very slowly I passed the bench seating while looking around the interior of the old church. A back door was also open to the elements leading to the grounds behind the building. Walking slowly across the room I stood and looked through the back door out unto a church graveyard. The old cemetery there was overgrown and perhaps long ago deserted from use. Beyond the graves was a river with clear blue water cascading over polished riverbed stones with the water gently moving downstream.

 

It occurred to me that the minister of the church himself may be sleeping there in that yard. Putting it more bluntly to myself I thought again that he may be dead and laying in one of those burial plots rotting.  The thought passed through my mind again several times as I stood there contemplating what might have been that old churches history.

 

As I looked about the church and wondered what to do next I noticed a beam of sunlight that shone through a window where it’s pane was jaggedly broken off with the splintered glass laying around the window ledge. My thinking was quiet now, not busy, as I stood there in the silence watching the sunlight fade.  I thought, while contemplating my life reflectively, that God had been kind to me as I considered my life before now standing there in the old church.

 

Then looking once again through the back door, I saw again the rivers almost tranquil waters rippling further down stream over some green moss covered stones.  I decided to step out the back door of the dusty old Church stepping now into the graveyard. While standing there the sound of the wind came gently blowing through the trees around me. I felt the warm wind meet my face pleasantly.  This was a place for peace and reflection I considered now looking at the gravestones. A leaf went by moving downstream on a journey down the river, floating, moving, down it went, across green mossy rocks. I thought to myself now that nature can be a great place to watch the world go by.

 

A strange thought occurred to me now which I thought was due probably to too much television watching. The inappropriate thought was that wild shrieks have never before issued from any of this worlds hallowed tombs. I thought to myself imaginatively that dead men have never come back again and walked about in the history of the world. Instead, I thought, the great bell had never tolled for them again, it had went unrung and untouched by men who can’t talk or can’t think anymore. The livings curfew was up signaling the end of our parting days.

 

I noticed now a local farmer and ploughman headed homeward nearby the churchyard plodding his way wearily home on a distant hill. Here in the cemetery, I thought seeing him in the distance and glancing at a few tombstones, buried here are several other farmers. They had already left the world to join the darkness and take their chances on the other side. Yet the living barely came here now to this place I accepted. Few ever tread over the grass to visit and read these almost ancient gravestones now with their long forgotten names. Today was different, today the graveyard drew me I thought, a member of the living. Yet still the graveyard never again drew anymore of the dead I considered again as I asked the question why.

 

“Are we the only members of the living who ever bother to visit here?” Came an unexpected voice abruptly sounding behind me. It was an aged voice spoken to me from behind where I stood. The voice startled me causing me great alarm at first. I jumped, very startled, and turned around to see an elderly figure dressed in black, with a grey beard, a big hat, and large spectacles.

 

“We’ve both come to read the stones for now and then we’ll go away when it comes our turn.” The old man said now solemnly. “Tomorrow or the day after that it will come when we’re both dead. Perhaps we'll both come here to stay? Well our time will come soon enough my friend even for you too, though you’re younger. Time has a way slipping by however!”

 

“How is it that no one dead ever seems to come to us from the grave and say hello.” I asked the old man.

 

“Speak for yourself friend! I’ve talked to people from my memories on many a lonely night and received reassurances from them and God about the fate of those loved ones and friends.” He said this and then said in a more friendly voice. “What is it that we are shrinking from anyway when it comes to dying? Don’t you think It would be clever of us if we told the gravestones that men now hate to die and have decided to stop dying forever. I think the gravestones would believe the lie don’t you?”

 

The old man told me now he had been a Parson. He walked over and shook my hand and then he walked to an old bench beside the Church where he sat down. I walked over and sat down on the other end of the bench where we sat with our backs to the old wooden church. Me and the old religious man then engaged in a discussion. At first we discussed only light subjects.

 

We were there for quite some time talking with the evenings darkness closing in on us fast. To look at the old man he appeared almost ghost like, like a figure from some bygone age, from another century even, with his solemn looks, and with his old grey beard. This parson and I sat there by this dilapidated old church with him talking to me like a long lost relative.

 

The longer we talked there the more detailed his views became. Gradually our interest level increased and our  engagement intensified. Because we had this mutual interest in what one another had to say there developed now a competition for good ideas leading into a spirited debate. Looking across the moss covered gravestones we talked like this enthusiastically for an hour. The later part of the day passed as the twilight set in.

 

The  parson decided to quote to me a scripture verse impulsively amidst a debate we were having.  Looking over at me, his wild eyes peering at mine through his big awful looking spectacles, he lowered his eyes and looked downward to the open page of a Bible that he had produced from his coat pocket. He read to me from the ancient Book.

 

“Let every soul be subject to the higher powers...the powers that be are ordained by God.”

 

The parson read me this passage in an almost thunderous preachers voice. The intensity of his deep voice seemed to be almost hallowed by it’s use. He seemed to be trying to convert the wild flowers or the croaking frogs chirping in the long marsh grasses on the opposite bank of the river, if indeed they needed converting which I seriously doubted. Then looking up at me from the page the parson set down his old Bible.

 

“What do you think about this verse?” He asked me now curiously.

 

I thought there about the passage he had read thinking to myself in the quiet. The passage from scripture he quoted I knew was from St Paul. I thought about it for quite some time. I understood the verse, it was a familiar doctrine asking that every soul be subject to the higher powers because they were chosen, or put in place, or justified, by God.  I knew from the words “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers” that the idea of the verse was meant to mean by it’s context that whatever power rules over you that it is supposed to be obeyed because it is “ordained by God.” The Bible verse therefore demanded that all Christians subject themselves willingly to earthly authority whoever it happens to be ruling over them.

 

The parson had given me some time to comment and I hadn’t as yet found an answer to give him. The absence of my voice left only the silence of the evening with the sound of nature around us. As I thought there further in silence, with the faded half hidden moon visible in the darkening blue sky, the old parson decided to continue on with what he had been saying.

 

“I will tell you the truth my friend.” He said wanting to discuss his theological views with me. “I have a problem with absolute instructions like this one. Scripture or no scripture I will explain why I am leery of absolutes. Several hundred years ago, before our time, an underground current of thought existed in England. This thought was millenarian, anarchistic, and utopian and it was advocating for something different then Paul's text. The thought called instead for anarchy in the overthrowing of the state itself. This thought was radical and was calling for a return to what these radicals called ‘A sinless Eden.’”

 

I asked the old parson curiously “What was a sinless Eden Mr. Parson?”

 

“You must understand first before I tell you the answer”  the old parson continued with enthusiasm. “The idea of a sinless Eden was an idea born during the aftermath of a vicious Civil War during the Commonwealth in England. In these times such radical ideas had broken to the surface. A sinless Eden was an idea that was seen to be  half-religious, and half-secular as an aspiration. A sinless Eden, to those who wanted it, would be instantly attainable in the act of rejecting ones own government and rejecting all religious authority and it’s doctrines.”

 

I listened to the history and nodded that I understood now.

 

“The radicals believed” he continued on “that the guilt of sin was constructed only as a way to control the people. They saw religion, and also government, as something that was being imposed on them from above and they wanted to be free from it. The Church and secular power were seen to be oppressive forces keeping people in subjection by guilt and power. This sinless Eden that they envisioned would offer a new found freedom liberating them after the government and the Church and the doctrine of sin was removed.”

 

I thought about the belief there and said. “They predicted that what would develop afterward would be a perfect functioning society?” I asked him.

 

“Yes and I must say that the idea that religious doctrine was something invented to control the masses was an idea that I found worthy of serious consideration for many years.” The parson admitted this reluctantly to me now looking at my reaction.

 

I considered the the possibility of A Sinless Eden developing but I was dubious about the idea of it working and I asked the parson now.

 

“With no way of managing the ideas of the people and no way of deciding judgments in affairs that effected change and order in society then wouldn’t these people and their communities then slip into a kind of chaos by this anarchy?” I asked him.

 

“Of course It would not have become any better for them after anarchy and yes we know it would have lead only to chaos. We know that in our privileged time now. My point is that these people believed by such ideas that life would get better by using anarchy as the path to achieve results. They envisioned the action of rebellion as bringing about a perfect form of order.”

 

There was quiet now for a minute as we both sat in the dusk thinking about Paul’s teaching and the anarchists of England. Then the parson continued.

 

“The people were weary about anarchy returning after England had recently struggled through a bloody civil war. The civil war had ravaged the countryside. The last thing citizens wanted was more unrest and more horrific bloodshed. The citizen's of England wanted stability so instead of anarchy they chose to cling to the rule of the state. Preachers used eloquence to support this cause of course giving justification by scripture to the rulers authority.  The justification for power came from  both the divine right of Kings and Paul’s scripture.”

 

“The Bible was used  to  justify and strengthen the kings claim to legitimate rule?” I asked.

 

“Yes it was and the apostle Paul’s words were used to reinforce absolute obedience to the king. The scripture has been continually used like this everywhere throughout history to justify whoever has the power. What do you suppose life might have been like in Rome though my friend as Christianity was growing and being threatened by the continually changing emperors? These new Emperors would be constantly challenging and threatening the new religions right to exist.”

 

“Life for early Christians must have been full of great peril and uncertainty.” I said. As the parson asked me this question it occurred to me that he seemed like a thinking person deeply concerned with these kind of questions. I thought I was seeing in him now a man who had likely searched throughout his entire life for answers into these mysteries. He was a man with a mind, it now seemed to me, that had wrestled with the truth of God amid a life path that involved a serious study of history too. He obviously knew that history without apologizing for any knowledge he discovered or believed. It seemed that he had followed that knowledge wherever it took him in the pursuit of histories most honest revelations. He had followed that inquiry wherever and however much that knowledge challenged his faith.

 

“Would Christianity's authors have been pressured in the introduction of what content they wrote down in creating the New Testament?” He asked and quickly continued. “Would those authors have feared those secular Roman emperors of the time that were clearly deciding the fate of all Christians? How would the faith have been allowed to grow and flourish under these secular powers if anarchy was part of the religious canons message?”He looked over at me with a grim expression as we thought upon these questions.

 

The parson then added solemnly. “Wouldn’t the severe hand of the state have wiped out the entire new faith if some kind of instruction wasn’t written into the scripture ensuring that Christians would not be a threat to the secular emperor?” The parson asked me this now with a curios look.

 

“Are you suggesting that the Bible was written by ordinary men? Are you saying it was written by a human strategy  so that it allowed for it to endure under the secular powers of the state?” I asked him this now curiously and in a slightly startled voice looking up at him as the sun was setting over the trees above us. Shadows were forming on the grave yard grasses around us now.

 

“I SUGGEST ONLY WHAT’S REASONABLE TO SUGGEST!” he shouted out now with great anger and defiance. “MAN OR GOD, SOMEONE KNEW WHAT HAD TO HAVE BEEN SAID AND WRITTEN DOWN! GOD OR MAN KNEW THE NEED TO ALLOW THE RELIGION TO SOMEHOW CONTINUE. SO YOU CHOOSE WHO CREATED WHAT AND WHY!” He snapped this at me in a raised voice. He spoke with such energy and passion spit gathered on the edge of the old parsons lips. He took a hanky out of his pocket and wiped the spit away now.

 

“Listen to me!” He continued now in a calm low voice just as a pack of nearby coyotes sounded eerily from the surrounding hills. ”A hundred years after the anarchists there was a very different revolution in France to consider. This revolution in France violently overturned the old regime and the monarchy. Now the same kind of loyal theologians that were obedient to the teaching of Paul back in England were now faced with a brand new obligation in France. They now had to take the revolutionary oath under the new dictator Napoleon.“

 

“But how can anyone be truly loyal to a dictator?” I asked him while considering the demands of obeying Paul’s scripture.

 

“Nonviolently, obediently, by praying for him, by following his directions dutifully, according to the clergy anyway!” As the old parson spoke these words he seemed to scoff at the idea. “But things got allot worse for obedient churchmen in France after the royal trappings of loyalty dropped away and the principle was then revealed for what it meant in it’s honestly!” The parson said now looking at the sky and then back to me frowning and then continuing. “Now the churchmen came to realize that a new oppressive government had to be obeyed and it was a bitter pill now to swallow for them!”

 

The old parson relaxed and smiled solemnly now and then reached over and patted my shoulder and then speaking quietly he said.

 

“How bitter it must have been for the German and Russian Christians to accept this text of Paul's with the call for obedience under the rule of Hitler and Stalin!”

 

“The Bible has been used then to justify obedience to these evil forms of government in power? The scripture was interpreted to even mean that Christians should support the Nazi regime?” I asked now in horror while thinking about the implications of the old parsons words.

 

“Many injustices have been justified in the name of our Lord my friend in the interpretation of scripture. Have you heard of how men used the Bible to justify slavery?”

 

The parson said this to me and then stood up and walked to the third headstone away from where I sat. He reached out now and ran his hand lovingly over an inscription there. Finally he said in a choked up voice.

 

“Can you believe that I’m ninety-six years of age?” I looked at him with understanding as he continued to speak. “God has been good to me my friend. Will you stay here a while longer and we’ll look up at the stars together?” He asked me this now with hopeful eyes.

 

“Sure.” I said. “I have nowhere to be.”

 

The parson asked me now.

 

“What do you think when you look up at the Heavens above friend?”

 

“When I look up at the Heavens I believe” I started to say but hesitated. I then finally responded to him after some time spent thinking there. “ I believe that here on this ancient object.”

 

“The Earth.” The parson interjected. 

 

I gave him a nod. “Yes” I said then and continued. “ I believe on this Earth that when I look at the Heavens above that here we are completely surrounded by the unknown. We don’t know what’s below us or what’s above us in any direction. Mr.. Parson this makes the details of what is out there unspeakable. Nonetheless that something real and discoverable is actually out there is as real as I am or you are sir. The unknown we are yet unable to conceive of because those mysteries are not yet encountered by any of us but that they are out there we should not doubt for a second. Nor should we doubt that those wonders transcend our imaginations in the creativity they entail!”

 

I considered my words now with care and said very passionately to him. “We live haunted by the unknown everywhere around us in the sky. We’re also haunted with the uncertainty of what happened before us behind our own times.  I believe we only have a partial understanding of the history that proceeded us and as of yet no real solid understanding as to the size and details of life’s larger mysteries around us.”

 

I realized now in answering the old man that I had called the preacher Mr. Parson several times and it occurred to me now that I didn’t know his real name although he knew mine. He didn’t seem to mind but instead looked to be interested in my ideas and so I decided to continue.

 

“I am encouraged though Mr. Parson that we are willing to look about us at the empty abyss of the sky at night and that we want to try and fathom it nonetheless. We wonder about us looking out into that infinite intergalactic space with such big questions asked from here about where we are in our lonely coordinates. Wherever this really is amid everything else then somehow, some day, an intelligence itself will no doubt enable someone to map out for us our very location. Amid the vast unknown some intelligence will offer us some actual awareness of our surroundings and where we are. That intelligence will detail for us our mysteries existence by describing to us the grand picture in it’s completeness or will partially offer some enticing  piece of the unceasing and continues puzzle of our aliveness. The answer to existence itself exists however Mr. Parson and one day it will explain to us exactly what we’re apart of here in the immense and mind-bogglingly large experience of  existence.“

 

The old parson looked over at me as the last signs of daylight evaporated. With the ending of day gone it left now only the bright moon on our face and more then a handful of evening stars lighting up the darkness enveloping about us.

 

“You see where that star above us shines almost cold and dispassionate almost with a smile?” The parson asked me now in the darkness. “If in a flash, my friend, I could travel there then how many, many miles I’d go!” He elaborated now. “If  only I could travel with my soul now!” The old parson beat his chest now feverishly almost with violence.”When my soul is unprisoned from this earthly bond then time will not be able to count my markless flight beyond those stars. BEYOND I SAY!” He shouted  out these last words very loudly now.

 

The Parson said this to me in a voice so deep that it seemed to go sweeping invisibly in the darkness across the hills. Quietly now he added very calmly.

 

“A bit of poetry I picked up somewhere along the way.”

 

Me and the parson sat quietly in the darkness looking at the brilliant universe around us. After a while he said to me  interrupting the quiet..

 

“When I am really weary, and I am really old now so that kind of weariness is approaching fast, and a day comes friend where I am unable to find any delight at all. When I am totally spent from this life. If then, like a bird that tries to use its wings too long,  I can’t use those wings anymore. I like that bird then will nest awhile instead of taking flight. I will rest amid the grasses and instead of flying I’ll sing there.  I will drop right down in that grass entirely at last leaving any wonderment that I had if it all must be.  I will find there rest In the timelessness and space of the earth amid the soil, where the wind, and the sunshine, and the planets motion continues moving on around me. I will stay there with the little things that are the grass and the flowers.”

 

“However Donald!” Said the Parson now with great seriousness and unflinching conviction. “If I’m instead with my God, which Is where I know myself to be going. If I’m in flight with Him then my wings will  beat until I’ve gone so far,  far from the kind grass, even that grass which is so cool and deep. I will be poised instead among the winds on high. From there I will sing to God as I move from star to star and as I pierce the sunshine itself. I will keep a song always as I meet Jesus amid the farthest sky of HEAVEN ITSELF!”

He thundered out these last words with his voice almost echoing into the night air.

We sat awhile longer together there. Not long after our discussion had ended we began making our way through the darkness to the car. I then drove the old parson to his house nearby and helped him find his way into his kitchen after finding him an outdoor light switch. After a few directions from him and a heartfelt handshake we said our goodbyes me and the old parson for now. I then drove out of his yard and met the Rawdon hills. Soon I was in Milford and turning unto the 102 highway and I was making my way back home to Brookfield.

Whisky, God, prayer, philosophizing

I was on the gulf shore with family recently standing on the third sandbar out on a hot early September day. I had a bottle of Royal Reserve whisky, a two liter bottle of diet Pepsi, a glass, and a folding chair. Between sips of whisky (like I’m doing right now which is why this blog entry might sound like gibberish no matter how much editing I do) I walked out into the offshore shallow water there. Standing in the water,  I laid back in the salt water floating and praying like I do when I’m in or by the ocean.

 

I looked across the waters surface off to the horizon toward PEI and there in silence God reminded me of a verse of scripture I didn’t fully remember the words to. I knew it was God speaking to me however and that the scripture was related to something said related to Gods Spirit moving across the waters. I was with my friend, maybe my only friend, and He was reminding me of His eternal presence with me and in creation.

 

Here now, while having a few drinks, I’ve decided to philosophize like I currently don’t understand things about God or understand Him like I do as a friend. My faith really does remind me of His existence but I figure people are in different mindsets and the truth is uncertain and filled with so many legitimate arguments.  I therefore don’t want to preach but try to reason and speculate about the unknown.

 

Was there previously before the present time that we now know a power of love. Was then this force of love In some prehistoric place and existing amid a preexistence before us in our time. Did love proceed us before this world we now know was here or before any of us fought for the truth of things we may now search for. Was love there, and is love still here the big questions.

 

I wonder about this, does that kind of absolute unending something good really exist. Does an intelligible thinking force transcending us then, for whatever reason, hide from us and only reveal itself, Himself, Herself, conditionally, based on experiences, our will, our sense of fairness, through our sorrows etc.. Are these illusions of a God’s beauty real. Are such transcending possibilities about the truth really how things ultimately are or merely how we estimate them to be sometimes.

 

I ask this wondering If a force of some kind of good transcends us. Are the ways of such a forces capacity really ways of love that are pleased with conditions of good. Can this force really be trusted to be compassionate and can it by it’s essence and character truly deliver us beyond the chaos we currently struggle amid. If this love is a thinking power is it by it’s nature then a power that naturally knows a loyal and dedicated love. Can this love be grounded on unalterable, non diminishable, truly compassionate terms.

 

With it’s voice maybe then this power knows and is able to speak life itself into existence. With a better and fairer vision then ours and of the infinite and eternal does such a creative capacity love beyond our inadequate limitations. Is there then a force beyond us that builds life through thought, through a word, creating the world as we know it to be.

 

I know that we arrive on the journey through the ages at a point on the timeline of history. We have limited, hindered, inaccurate self-awareness. Our ideas compete with each other by making claims of “the truth” as we move forward building upon these understandings as we continuously contribute to the world by thought through the generations. We hear rumors as we move through life of love written and translated and recycled. Yet our methods for acquiring “the truth”  are possibly flawed as too is our loyalty flawed to the old and new systems of thought that are giving us answers.

 

Our attitudes toward what the truth is becomes reckless, defiant and boldly resistant because of these systems of thought, myth, unbending theory,  etc..Truth isn’t just there or obvious on our journey despite claims of such.  Perfect love is seen by us only in a haze because as human beings we can only see through a glass that obstructs our capacity to see fully to know that kind of love. Our tribal associations puts limitations on our grasp of seeing the humanness of one another. We gather in a pact of people reminding ourselves, reinforcing ourselves, in our like-mindedness, that we supposedly know everything relevant because of these beliefs we have as a group. We are determined there in those places, by our irrationality, to blindly offer certainty claims to the others we accept and then to reject the alternative others who experience life differently. That false certainty is regularly fed and delivered into susceptible minds that are offering these people the supposed laws and certitudes of the fate of imperfect human beings. What ultimately lies beyond us and our own groups claims is blindly explained away in a contest of idea claims. We share the unquestioned laws and ideas of our own inheritance catering to interests entirely self justifying that usually leave out one another.

 

We in this way become at our worst the vulgar travelers across the world stage. We move through time spitting and punching and yelling and screaming and mocking and often shutting each other out. We conspire to do evil against one another at our very worst on ideological grounds. While at our best we humble ourselves conquering our pride, forgiving each other and finding ways to love our neighbor however far away or different the culture of our neighbor is or how awful that cultures influence is there where they live.

 

I wonder here now in Nova Scotia, do we have any reason now to see good in the grandiosity of life. We know we defy moral boundaries stepping from good into evil naively, often innocently enough, in Africa, in the Middle East, everywhere in this world where human beings are. The human person loses his or her way often. The world struggles on with ideas competing for the truth and often as a rule arriving at misunderstandings. It’s more common for a human being to arrive at a false judgment then at finding the truth.

 

Does our comprehension of love end in our death and in our loved ones deaths. This is the tragedy of life. We all fear or accept we may fade away with time. Some new band of wonderer then passes the roadside cemeteries where our bones lay under the topsoil and grass. Are we all together in death though. I hope we become better friends in death then in life. I speculate if our minds and capacity for understanding are opened in death then that we’re going to be set on a continuing journey to really know and care about each other.

 

Love might surpass this kind of hopeful speculation though. Love might be bigger then this and traverse all the boundaries of supposedly being realistic. The truth may transcend doubt, cynicism,  fear and despair. Love itself might really hold such a masterful grip on this life beyond anything a mortal being can appreciate. Ultimately then by this kind of optimism or faith we’re then by this power rescued from the depth of our seeming final undoing.

 

This world we’re on staggers forward in the unknown Universe with it’s outer unending multiverses or perhaps a different unconsidered law of infinity itself full of the potential boundless creative works in it’s nature. We are all somewhere here now we don’t know amid something larger, much larger, amidst the greatest of all possible unknowns. We live amid this unknown and before a frontier of infinite uncertainty. Our sights and hopes and struggles continue on as we go onward on this journey.

 

The question becomes how far are our sights. How deep is the awareness of our love for one another. How complete is our capacity to see the real dignity of the human person here in this life and after death itself. Can we love mankind universally wherever that person ends up and however misguided they were in reaching ultimately what’s beyond here in this world.

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.

A struggle for love

I struggle to understand the world we’re a part of as I make entry’s to this blog. For anyone who reads it there is no doubt that some readers will have given these issues clearer thought then I have. I don’t profess to have any expertise of course in questioning issues like this one. I just have an opinion that’s continuously growing. 

 

When I look at life and access reality then what occurs in thought, when I’m honest with my own feelings, is finding myself desiring that the entire world be loved and by loved I mean really loved completely. In thinking about the word love I believe that the world we inhabit is already indeed truly loved in this way. I understand that religious scriptures speak of this love for us as a part of creation in a very profound way. Unfortunately however the answer to what love is for humanity appears to stop loving many people inevitably and ultimately at the end of their life. Multitudes of people’s lives by this scriptural interpretation then are rumored to be lost to love when death arrives. Even worse then the majority of people not going to be with God in love are the very cruel, cold, hopeless and archaic story’s of eternal punishment that have haunted many past and present generations imaginations unfairly.

 

Different ideas in the world convince people of different truth claims and lead to differently perceived understandings of what the truth is. These underpinning arguments form an understanding of God or science etc.. They describe to people how the world works and result in the different beliefs people have. When our lives end in these various states, states of different misunderstandings, the idea many religious people have, that they seem far too comfortable with, is that Gods love is gone for those who are wrong about the truth. For mass groups of human beings they have been excluded from salvation. Theology for the human beings outside a certain understanding seems terribly unfair however.

 

I cannot accept this claim that “most” of the world will end up abandoned for denying the truth. That people could have accepted this one belief as the truth but didn't seems unreasonable to assume. Such a calculation so observed is clearly false given the nature of the world and the competition in it for ideas. The belief that love will abandon people who are being persuaded and shaped simply because they are vulnerable and impressionable  to ideas is sad. People come from different cultures entirely and the idea they fall victims to error because of their own will is a cruel outdated concept that causes great pain. Such thinking causes pain because it loses sight of our common humanity and therefore makes us distrust and suspect one another unreasonably and unnecessarily. We are all in this world as people. I believe with great conviction that God loves the whole world.

 

I know there is a God too. My problem with what scripture is seeming to say is not a doubt about Gods existence. I trust God who I communicate in prayer with. I want for Gods love to really belong unto all of mankind because it makes sense. I want to have real compassion, a deeper connection without suspect, for people. I want a compassion that's not based on conditional love that leads to inevitable collapse. I want to love human beings in every remote and impoverished place, in whatever war torn region of Earth that people kill and are killed. I want to love people whatever thought dominates their minds whether it’s good or bad thought that’s effecting their judgment.

 

This is the love I feel when I talk to Jesus of the Gospels in prayer. I trust God as having a love that loves us far beyond other human beings understandings.

 

Life is difficult to live for love. When we try to dedicate our life in a way that truly loves people people intervene and remind us how we’re not really doing it. Even believing in God as love and taking His council to heart makes navigating people extremely difficult. Chaotically, confusingly, amid a difficult terrain, life is a mind field of ideas to navigate. Gossip and other forms of human discussion aggravate into disruptions to:  peace, pride, ego, reputation and honor. Behavior and it’s consequences are then obviously going to challenge us all in this way. Our peace can be effected poorly in us in this way very frequently. As our emotional journey proceeds interactions with individual people lead to intense loyalties with some and intense hatreds of others if we don’t overcome those angers.

 

Love when pursued amid the difficult terrain of the world can be harnessed for very good effects though. If we pursue love with resolve and vigilance trusting that God is love and replacing our egos unrighteous attitude. If we conquer our pride that would of lead to the harm of others then we win.

 

In the world there are ideological assumptions of who God is and who He loves and is loyal to. Wars between cultures occur on this  ground. Here for us with time dwindling by and our mortality ever nearer to it’s end we can choose to pursue love for a mystery and a reason we value. Our entire generation will be beyond the mortal world soon enough and then I believe we’ll really there begin to cultivate our relationships in a way that truly loves and matters to each other in a place of real fairness.

Why creativity and imagination? Why?

We are born into human form in this life with a mind that day dreams, imagines, hopes and struggles for the best scenarios we can think of as we strategize for ourselves the achievement of a happier existence. All of these uses of thought and imagination we use are part of a curious reality we are part of wherever it is we are now experiencing it in the universe. 

 Why do we spend so much time mentally picturing ourselves with more resources, in a better social existence, being liked and loved more strongly, being able to find more pleasures, being surrounded by the most beautiful scenery. Why do we aspire towards more beautiful objects in paintings, buildings, the natural settings we appreciate now. Why do we also use our minds to picture ourselves in an even better state of existence then the one we currently are in? 

Who instilled this creative and fantasizing drive in us? Some will say evolution sparked this practical impulse that is persuading us to build communities in the conditions that help for a better evolving species. I don't agree with this argument.  

We dream of more happiness, better circumstances, to be better loved, to be more admired, to have no dangers confronting us, to have no worries, because this is a clue to something beyond us. The clue is that we exist in this mysteries prison of a home, where life's terms are often very disagreeable, while struggling in this existence so hard for something better and that is a huge clue. The clue is while we exist here and now we aspire with this creatively guiding hope and use of the imagination to transcend the present circumstances of an often beautiful, interesting, but yet chaotic and incomplete beauty and understanding. We are looking forward then toward an ultimately unfulfilled reality for the reason that it may very well turn out that this higher reality exists and remains waiting to be fulfilled for us.  

Our struggle for ideas: good ideas, evil ideas, confused ideas, insufficiently understood ideas, is part of a confusion that leaves people trying very hard to make life make sense in this world. We try hard to account for injustice, to remedy it's obvious ugly consequences, as we observe it happening frequently before our eyes. We are trying to make sense of evil and make everything work out for the good so that life makes sense for the good. 

 Why should we be so driven to make sense of the world in this way along with us having such aspirations to find a fulfillment of something better? We can even achieve successes in this strategizing for something better momentarily. 

 I suggest we strive for something better, fairer, more beautiful, where we're loved more, where our opportunities are greater, where death is over and gone, where happiness is unaffected by cruelty and inequality, because we are meant, for a greater reason, to aspire toward this better existence for a purpose. 

 We aspire for a better norm, a greater good, because whatever structured the universe, whatever ends up being behind it and and our existences here, has that ultimate purpose of something better in mind for us.  

We are on rout therefore to something greater, something better and fairer, a fuller version of the love we have now in a glimpse, where that love we now know is incomplete and at least for now remains imperfect. We are soring through deep space in our galaxy amid the infinite unknown not as perfect answerers of our reality but as children yet to understand that great unknown beyond us.

Could these hopes we carry through life of something better ultimately find fulfillment in something a great deal better then we can conceive? Could that hope ultimately surpass that imperfect imagination of ours by surpassing our wildest dreams with what we ultimately end up discovering? I suggest the evidence points that way. There is more to the experience of hoping and striving for the best of ideas then an empty illusion we chase for no greater reason or purpose. Life is grandeur and God is bigger then we can comprehend.

Great Controversy

Don’t we all live in a world where people are blank canvasses being written on all over the earth. We are therefore being shaped by those writing processes that come to us most influentially in our immediate surroundings. The influences that are designing who we are come from our surroundings but they also come because of the time period we live in.

 

Because of these historical developments and our surroundings people everywhere are effected by competing ideas. These ideas are competing for our acceptance of what truth is.

 

Those same forces in religion assert truths about God and His supposed revelation to us. We can never question this revelation much though because it is buried in history written with authority a long time ago. 

 

The problem for people everywhere is most of the time they aren't equipped with an inward ability to evade the widespread dogmas that confront them in the world. Whatever can convince will convince. People are more often wrong then right. All ideas can be made into complicated arguments that win elegance.

 

The wide spread doctrines that are shaping our truth claims in the world develop dependent on where we live. We know this is true, don’t we, since isn’t it obvious enough to observe. People can’t overcome circulating large scale ideology. For an example look at entire geographies across the earth of places of likeminded belief as an example of truth claims and that dogma there winning beliefs adherence for those people in those different places.

 

True in some places some of the time people decide between one path of identity to another in these situations but only sometimes. Yet dare we assume that our ability, the majority of the time, is able enough, on it’s own, by itself, to discern past our familiar environment to figure out another of life’s other argued paths?

 

How can we traverse our community, step into a foreign one, and navigate these buriers required to embrace another's truth. What the “truth” is and what right is are entirely subjective though. Our convictions about the truth are open to great debate, dispute, and are effected by many misleading persuasions all while being faced with great uncertainty.  Because of this uncertainty the individual is up against ideas in his/her culture being forced on him/her that are winning him or her over innocently enough all over the world to different kinds of thought and have been all across time.

 

Humanity then staggers onward through a very confusing world and always has in the past don’t you agree? As we stagger onward there are some doctrines that are better then others perhaps. Don’t even the best of doctrines however have their arbitrary side?

 

For instance the idea the world has hope in it only for those who embrace a belief system of one kind. Most people can’t possibly appreciate one certain claim however do to time, place, culture, familiarity etc. but God supposedly doesn’t care about that. He supposedly only saves Christians for example according to this way of thinking. These teachers of this way suggest this to us by trying to represent this claim of truth believably to us. As it appears, however, if it is looked at honestly for what it really says, it’s pure madness to think about the destiny of so many of us being Hell and this is actually what so many believe and they are quite ok with it.

 

For every person in attendance at an evangelical crusade, for instance,  there is a million other people that weren't exposed to the message. Many millions of people therefore didn't stand up and publicly embrace a doctrine. Supposedly that is the only like path that can help us in our eternal destiny. if we do the math this doctrine casts away great multitudes of humanities population. Do we dare see it as unfair? I personally see it as unfair in this way.

 

Despite the big ideologies in civilization shaping our overall world views aren’t we effected as well with actual instances where we do use a will. That we have a will, if we do, it then complicates this human picture even further. We at times, do we not, have some ability to choose with an act of our will? 

 

On a personal level can we then wrestle between the thoughts that are persuading our actions to good and evil ends. Our minds might sometimes blindly follow evil but at other times are we not able to wrestle with bad ideas avoiding their influence. It can seem at these times like there is a force that is trying to beguile us into acts of injustice, rage,cruelty, revenge etc.. Are we able to act for the good of us and others at these times perhaps and can we use our will to will to act right.

 

It seems though that often we don’t know how to act and where to direct our will in our thinking in these situations. Perhaps at these moments of indecision we haven’t the foundational examples of right behavior. Could this be one of religions often unrecognized relevance's. Is there arguably more to religions relevance then just some insightful moral teachings.

 

By insightful moral teaching I mean Jesus saying “Love your enemy” “Do good to those who hate you and despitefully use you.” “Remove the beam from your own eye first so you can see well enough to remove the timber from your brothers eye.” I do not mean to point to the rare passages of outdated views found elsewhere attacking gays for example.

 

I wonder also about the description of the character of God and the claims of His existence. In a mysterious world located in the middle of nowhere amid deep space perhaps these ideas shouldn’t be easily overlooked if they are fair and include everyone.

 

The world appears to be a place where the ideas around us are constantly at war. Should any person be unworthy of compassion here in this place with the world being so vulnerable to so many currents of persuasion? With world communities coerced into these doctrines that linger on taking hold hundreds of years earlier. With these views continually, through the generations, repeatedly instilling their views to the adherence of each coming generation. It’s a path I now wonder about that we’re on. I wonder about the truth. I believe as I wonder while being thoroughly convinced that there is a God and that His nature is love.

 

In my concern for what truth is and what we're supposed to think about God and love and good and who's who and what's what what do I dare think about the truth? Do any of us dare believe everyone is worthy of our acceptance everywhere or instead is it fairer that people really be deserving of mostly our suspicion and condemnation. How to feel about the Muslim, Hindu etc.. communities of earth. Can people be loved by God enough to have hope despite their  belief, ideology, nationality? Can  people be empathized with if they are in great error, at least after the danger and threat they posse is gone?

 

The systems we now have say supposedly who's going to ultimately be good in God’s book and who's not going to be. For now these claims and beliefs suggest that God loves all the living. It’s the majority of the present, but soon to be dead, my heart feels for. Again lets be clear about what those doctrines really do when all is said and done. The ideas themself abandon great seas and multitudes of us human beings forever.

 

We are supposed to discern by these old doctrines that multitudes of people are lost and in the end beyond mercy or promise because they think differently about God in this chaotic and confusing world. Perhaps someone’s perception of God was developed while suffering under a dictatorship etc. but none of that is “rumored” to even matter. Do these doctrines abandon the real beauty and hope we have as human beings in this way?

 

The dignity of a person again is a canvass being drawn on. Unfortunately beyond a person finding insight in a confusing world that drawing may turn out beaten down, ripped, in tangles from life lived in the world.

 

Why can’t we, the discerners of this tragedy befalling on so many, allow actual love to reign as who we see God as and how we dare think He sees us. We need to salvage the broken image of our fellow man as we look at the world through modern eyes.

Staring into the great abyss of the unknown

In the beginning something did happen. The question is what happened in the beginning. Do we know what happened, any of us, or are we all dead wrong about it. Something did happen, there can be no doubt about that. The world came into it's orbit becoming a life sustaining platform some how in some way.  

 

Suppose we could trust no one to explain it to us. Suppose to trust the mind of mankind, however guided by science, reason, by religious revelation, was to be naïve and all of these tools were useless. Suppose knowing that far back in history was challenged by the inadequacies and lack of sophistication of human thought at the time to pass the truth on to us accurately through religion or historical writings or any other tool we now have.

 

If language was then in it's infancy. If communication was limited to limited means of story telling. If our knowledge of the world came then in the form of earlier mythological accounts. If what these unsophisticated minds thought they were seeing in the world came falsely because of myth then nothing could be passed along accurately.

 

Then religious revelation was a concocted story, nothing more, to name phenomena beyond the scope of our awareness. If it’s ideas then were purely myth suggesting thereby then, by these implications, that the truth of the identity of who we are would still remain open-ended.

 

If the origination of our curse as people (original sin ) didn’t come from what happened in a garden. If a beguiling serpent didn’t tempt us and lead us to the ugly side of our nature. If sins causes, that haunted our ancestors and haunt us, were simply speculative stories aiming to try and understand the cause of sin and understand the unknown then these writers were simply trying to put the unknown in perspective.

 

Science as well probably doesn’t account for the first cause but only has certain pieces of the puzzle unlike the overconfidence in supposedly a coherent tell all account.

 

Might there yet be a mastermind behind the created order if we do have so some much of it all wrong. If none of these explanations, entrenched in our civilization, are worthy of our complete and total and utter confidence. Does the resulting answer therefore, if we’re open-minded, leave truth to be an entirely open-ended question in our world?

 

The uncertainty of our existence is a puzzle that is utterly unknown therefore. Dare we envision the truth by life’s very terms, on this very day as we sit here reading this now, to be something left then open to nothing short of unfathomable potential possibility? As much as we can in all our potential energy speculate about it life would then remain a mystery on a scale of infinite size!

 

Perhaps our speculation fails us because we’re mortal and something beyond us is immortal or perhaps not. The unknown is the stage we all walk on and it’s grandeur  deserves more then the dulling down of it that we repeatedly reduce its potential size and possibility to. The truth is we don’t know the truth. We are as of yet pilgrims adrift in the sea of the universe wondering about reality.

 

Standing before the vastness of this universe, susceptible to many dangers in the ideological struggles that are shaping our world and our personality, we walk along on an orbiting ball. Our minds are capable of great acts of love and mercy, mental explosions of temper and blame, calculated acts of revenge, cruelty and violence. The stars above us remind us as we struggle on of the infinite outer reaches all lying hidden beyond us.

 

When man speaks to us in this confusion he/she reminds us of the many human beings lined up to speak to us and convince us they are miniature authorities (like me) and can guide our agreeable minds onward. We are continually being shaped by an orators skills. We are guided by his/her council, lifted up by a familiar belief system, inspired by stories, lulled into conformity to the grandiose supposed understandings of our world.

 

As we watch and listen and as our minds race and face maybe demonic traps that entice many of us to destructive ends. As we rise contrarily to that destructiveness to acts of compassion, forgiveness or mercy. As nature, chance, and uncertainty itself confront us. When we're reminded then of the hospital wards being the places we will spend our final hour in. As we then see the windswept cemeteries along the streets inside our cities we will rot in.

 

As time moves and tragedy strikes.As familiar faces pass hopefully we breath in some of life’s blessings standing before an ocean sunset, a quiet creek, talking with a loved one by cherishing their every whim.

 

Hopefully we look around us now and dare to believe something could be behind the chaos we sometimes know or see. As hard as open-mindedness can be in a world of unclear ideas and reoccurring horror lets try to believe that good may overarch our lives. If we can hope for it let us try to see by that hope, or faith, that somehow the world might be in good hands. Maybe in time, after all else is said and done, it could ultimately prove to be so.

 

If we go to our graves and know nothing of anything else at least let our consolation be that we go back into the course of the beauty of creation.

 

The truth to where we really go is it now carved in stone. Our existence in the present and future is worthy because of the unknown therefore of all types of intellectual curiosity, great wonderment and open-ended speculation. Dou to life’s strangeness our hope while living here in this world is just as possible as anything else. Impossibility could have been once said of the possibility of anything emerging into this state at all but yet here it all is and we are here to prove it.

Lets gets rid of Hell for good!

If Hell opened it's mouth allowing 26 billion souls to cry out with them being all former inhabitants of this lonely world. If they said things from the fiery ovens like. "HELLLLLLLLLLP HELLLLLLLLLLP REPENT BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE! SAVE YOURSELVES! BELIEVE AND BE SAVED!" and we the living human beings from here all listen to their pleas which obviously want to spare us an eternal place of torture.

 If we then reasoned, thinking there afterwards with our jaws open, that if we choose to confess with our mouth and believe with our heart we can go where all these billions in the fire ovens couldn't go, to a place of eternal joy, to a place of peace and love what might we think?  

What happens then when we get to this paradise if we choose right? Do we very understandingly and agreeably accept these whacky terms of Gods? These terms don’t they divide up the human race by confession and denial very unfairly? 

 This is a mad uneven handed world that fills the innocent minds that think susceptibly with these cockamamie ideas! The fate of all of us has to be in more reasonable hands then most of us being destined to some cesspool of misery and unending despair.

Throw out your volumes of instructions because the printing is chockfull of arbitrary ideas. Love has got to be fairer then to reject big chunks of our species and cast them off as unredeemable. When one quarter of the deciders were unfairly turned off by some strange money hungry t.v evangelist, another third came from an entirely different culture and history, another third weren't interested because churches tend to sing old fashioned sing songs on old organs and then have ministers rambling on for hours about old Testament myths. With unbelievable stories of man eating whales, pestilences, giant arks and staffs turning into snakes to listen to.  

Oh yeah how dare anyone doubt all those magical claims. What rights do any of us have after not adopting these wild mythological stories? We are doomed because of it by our own willful ignorance, supposedly, rejecting love and a good and fair God in spite of supposedly “His” need to conform our minds to these “outrageous claims.” We must cling with elegance to giants being slain by a miniature hero with a slingshot for instance.  

Then there are all these self congratulatory, club member, brothers and sisters in their fancy hats and nice suits and dresses going off into the sunset. They are too sure of themselves and their eternal escape from the damnation most of this scary world must by their rosy too happy calculus have to meet. They are quite ok with it too. This is Gods way and if people (so they reason) don't want to get their just deserve then believe exactly like they do. 

 People all over, obviously, just can't conform their minds universally to unbelievable exaggeration. The wild creation stories, seismic miracles, and unusually odd anomalies are too far fetched just because some fire and brimstone spewing Evangelist is calling out to vulnerable fearful minds to accept absolutely the only solution, supposedly, this scary world of our knows.  

That there in itself is a major part of the problem. There aren't great antidotes in vast supply to straighten out for us all this pain and worry and uncertainty. Jesus comes with allot of love and superior insight so what is the logical fair-minded person supposed to do. Do we just fall on our knees and accept the horrors befalling on most of mankind supposedly because Jesus seems fair in ways?  

This Hell invention could very well be the byproduct of some organizer in ancient Rome. To cement loyalty to a system it’s a clever idea to build a belief system and to enlist perfect conformity to it. Fear mongering is engineered to weed out any potential element of straggler. Reason alone can't  conform to the claims so here is the penalty of not adhering and it is a threat so unbearably unthinkable it will cause your teeth to clatter together in terror.  

In the middle ages there wasn't even an option for non conformity there was simply disembowelment while still being alive and other extremely cruel torture carried out in the name of God.  

Another great vision of human kind and a way to punish those not in line with “love.” Can love though coexist with barbarity? Love isn't it the stuff of fairness, kindness, mercy, justice? Wouldn’t Jesus have sent the bureaucracy of the middle ages packing off into the hills?  

Love has to be our guide in all things real and all things unseen. Our hope has to be in something better then exact conformity to a belief that is now too prominent. The idea of God and His Son Jesus as our hope doesn’t have to go if we want to embrace it. Yet as  the parishioners make their claims of what will befall most all of humanity, as they rehearse their Biblical passages without flinching what should a conflicted person do morally? 

in God’s very life He often reveals insights to suggest he's fairer then we are. Yet passages  suggesting a narrow road to life continue to haunt and trouble our weary world. Very old ideas winning people over to “love” by “terror” is what we also know. I realize I’m mentally ill but that we can’t make sense of these long held and passed down archaic ideas with any light of sanity makes me wonder just how insane the sane world really is.  

The nature of God written by a heritic!

I think the search for what truth is should be a search that is respected and defended. No one should be coerced by threat or unfair pressure to adapt to any view of what overarches our existence here in this world. The choice in deciding if there is a God, and who that God is, if at all believed in, should be entirely left in the control of the person deciding.

 

There is also enough reasons to doubt, in this chaotic world, and enough uncertainty to go around by the competing voices around us, to allow for atheism as a claim of the truth.

 

The truth is therefore, for reasons resulting from contemplative thought, left to our discernment by many disputing voices.

 

Truth seeking should always allow then various theory to be introduced, differing hypothesis, all challenges, doubt and disbelief. Truth finding isn't obvious enough to fairly handle these different searchers with their different perspectives into life's mysteries wherever their views happen to stand so if truth is that much of a struggle people need the right to look into it honestly in different ways. Of course none of this is new as systems of universal human rights have already arrived at these conclusions thankfully.

 

What then after that persuaded person begins believing what they believe follows next. The belief does something very unfortunate even after that free choice is permitted to occur. The belief then divides human beings according to that ideology's doctrine.

 

If God is existent, not nonexistent, and really is bigger then our hearts and minds suppose. If God loves us more then we love ourselves or each other. If our rigid doctrines and fixed beliefs in old Holy books, that are riddled with ancient myth and archaic law, is not the only hope we have say for instance. Where then, if this were true, might our hope begin and really end, if we could still dare hope in God or have any understanding of His ways, without this direction of these old Books.

 

The old Books are supposedly saying everything to be said about God’s nature in them can this be trusted as final? Is it possible the Holy Books are incomplete? Can they be partially filled with old superstition, partially filled with divine insight and direction? Can they compel adherence unfairly in ways like at times where they argue presenting God in unfavorable ways. Do some teachings justify war, while in other ways they construct great systems for good?

 

I purpose personally as “a Christian heretic” that God is bigger then our current systems suggest. I am placing my trust not in a war loving eternal Being either. If God is love, and I say He is, I then purpose then that His love is a love that can step over borders into distant ideological groups reaching the entire world over. God can therefore reach across ideological divides easily and fairly navigate amid all foreign tongues into lands with different books. He knows therefore, because He is God, the intricate secrets and histories of each individuals life and everyone’s personally lived struggling experience. What would that mean for people everywhere if they learned differently, had less advantage, were shaped some by favorable ideas some by unfavorable ideas?

 

If God was that big it would mean for them that He then could see every mistake we make and every time life’s imperfect forces misdirect a life. This God would also know every scar and every wound from childhood the person lives with. He would know and care about with love how he/she stumbled along in the world shaped by the impact of that life experience. He would know where anger and violence came from. He would know how the wounded person was won over to a violent path, for instance, or simply why a person was broken hearted, afraid, unfairly treated by the world, or where they went wrong in their moral character.

 

If God turned out to be bigger then the structures we build and cling to insanely He then would be fairer then we imagine. He would offer more of a hope then our current age continues to believe in. In order for us to change how we think we would have to revisit the old myths that divide us by our beliefs. The beliefs being competed over by clever orators giving speeches, sermons, and compelling a loyalty that now divide us up as human believers offering hope to only a small percentage of us as humanity. That hope comes if we have one answer right over another answer that is just as compelling is that reasonable for us still in this day?

 

I believe there is a good God and that He knows the intricate working of every person. I believe He loves all of us therefore His love is unconditional. I think God is, beyond what our limitations can envision, a merciful and loving Being and a friend to the ages.

 

I believe that this is the God we have and that His guidance is for us to live our lives with compassion and love. In Him is peace and hope. My example to point to in supporting this kind of far reaching love is Jesus life but there are other examples of good across religions.

 

The creativity we see around us is apparently part of God’s personality as well. Life as we see it is perhaps a canvass for God to paint on creatively amid other of His eternal endless canvases drawn on with designs we have never fathomed and that surpass our loftiest experiences and expectations.

 

These secret other worlds, systems, unusual places, perhaps are limitless and we as of yet only glimpse one of them while all the others are so unfamiliar to us we’d never predict them or even begin to understand them much like the mystery we know in this complex world of ours. We only see the genius in part. Most of us don’t know even a small percentage of the worlds creatures and beauties or it’s laws. The God I suggest is more just then politicians, generals, preachers and religious leaders as well.

 

Is hoping in a God this fair wise or is it truly deserving of disgust? Dare I go against certain scriptures to support my radical views? If I was right would life be better then how we currently organize it? If what I hoped for as real were true would that take away from Gods Holiness? Does the nature of God and His loving plan dare to go where I suggest it might really go? Should a love this inclusive dare reveal itself by trying to surpass the current limits of organized thought transcending old boundaries? Do these claims support a good and just Heavenly Father or if what I said about God were true would His nature not be as Holy and fair as some say it is as people presently interpret the truth of His plan?

 

Remember how many people have no hope beyond this world by these doctrines. Is that something sane or insane for us to believe? (Asked by a paranoid Schizophrenic)