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)

Existence

Whatever our origins, whether we came from a mystical garden where we were once sinless, innocent, naked wonderers standing in the presence of Almighty God, or we emerged from an evolutionary history of primates that started with genus Homo and lead to the emergence of Homo sapiens, we are apart of something mind-bogglingly large on a planet somewhere in time amid the deepness of space.  

Gradually our present state of existence has come about after being spurned on by human language which strangely seems to have contributed to our more complicated world view emerging out of the darkness of the past.

Through thought, expressed and made more elaborate through language, we became more conscious and somewhat self-aware. 

We began questioning the universe around us for answers, and then more answers after that, coming up with explanations in lots of unreliable mythical stories and then other unbending structural systems of theory. 

We human beings through life always stare death in the face while many of us struggle desperately to try and overcome it. That struggle is one aspect of a drama that unfolds across time and amid civilization involving many variations of experiences. 

Some of us try really hard to overcome this death and feel secure in It’s approach with hope of a future. Is that weakness which should shame the sojourner wondering on the shores of life? Why in our human uniqueness are we so self aware of death leading to such inventive, poetic, philosophical, scientific examinations in ways of looking at life and death.  

Our culture in the meanwhile thrives producing such diverse and interesting practices and thought. The sheer size of existence and its many subatomic, macro parts is astonishing. The scale and beauty of nature inspires in some of us what we might consider to be a sense of spiritual mystery, awe and fascination.  

The whole drama of our existence as human beings, it is rumored, began with a spark that brought us into consciousness while we differ with our explanations as to the origin and purpose of the spark.  

I like to look at the spark as something with an intelligent source of identity creative on a scale that is overwhelmingly obvious when it comes to the grandiosity of our present reality. There is so much here to study and observe and so many experiences with such unique phenomena. 

Can we say definitively we live in a Godless place while the outer reaches remain open canvasses of such immense uncertainty possibly infinite in their scope. With our surroundings spanning, extending perhaps one might surmise, into places with even more varied forces of phenomena and truth. With the unknown never properly documented or credibly fathomed or fully anticipated with the broadest kind of speculative abilities failing to come even remotely close to predicting the unknown itself.

The spark brought us into conscious awareness curiously to ask this very thing I’m considering. Was it merely an accident or a script we are meant to read from by the hand of a hidden author. Creativity might be our guide to ponder the depth of that authors genius if that kind of intelligence lives and is.

Nothingness

In nothingness perhaps is there nothing. Nothingness might be a place that exists somewhere then true. There might be a place where nothing happens, where nothing is seen, or heard, or understood in any way. Nothingness might be out there somewhere beyond the universe itself. Nothingness might also best express the emptiness that comes from an ending of thought, emotion, memory and consciousness.

 Death then, because of this ending, might mean unfortunately our eradication into nihilistic completion. The fact that infinity may remain after our death, extending out beyond our graves where our rotting corpse is, by extending off into the unending distances on all sides might not matter for us human beings. That we live or had once lived might be forgotten by the swift severe hand of destiny. Nothingness then might be for us an actual place even if the universe offers mindboggling secrets that keep unfolding forever. 

 Curiously nothingness is something we’re always up against aiming our thought and invented doctrines at trying to overcome. This great dark curtain must be overcome, for some of us at least, despite the staggering odds against it’s reminding messages. If the cold blank icy stare of death is observed it will rudely interrupt the most lofty of rumors of our resurrection.

Curiously even this odd anomaly of staring finality in the face seems strangely stage crafted for a great unfolding drama of some perplexing kind.

 

This however begs for another observation that should be considered. Nothingness is not really the order of existence. Curiously because of something called “existence itself” something actually happens as opposed to the absence of light, gravity, elements, thought etc.

 In this absence of what alternatively we would of thought of as nothingness, us people, and many other almost endless and uncountable varieties of phenomena, emerge and curiously flail about for a time amid the unknown itself.

We human actors of the stage of the world accumulate our opinions by making many observations while we ask the big questions of how the order of nature works. Is this searching merely an act of random desperation or a great calling we as yet don't fully appreciate or understand.

I'm now a heritic. Prepare the torture wheel!

If life ends up being finally clarified for us by ultimately describing and telling humanity why life is this way it would be a big moment. We now know the mixed messages we have been facing in life with all the: suffering, conflict, existence of evil, ideological uncertainty, chaos etc., that makes life here, for so many people, unbearable and horrible. What if then finally answers did come however. if we were to finally be filled in then on this mystery telling us the why answer. If this clarity came and were then to give humanity finally the real answers to life’s big questions what might this revelation to us say?

 

What If that explanation were to say to people, by a greater wisdom then any of us now have, then all our preachers have now also, that we people actually are the victims here in this place, in this world, whatever or wherever it is.

 

I now, based on my limited but yet still growing knowledge and study of history, wouldn't be personally surprised if that might be the answer we finally got. That answer being that we are the victims in life.

 

I’m definitely no scholar, true, although I’m growing somewhat wiser by personal studying. I’m now looking at experience by learning from the study of historians and philosophers, for instance, who are helping a little in somewhat demystifying that unknown. Everyone does this to understand the unknown because in life truth isn’t just there to discern without error. I didn’t have a clue, before I began to study this, about most of the past 2,000 years of Christian history. Yet even without a clue about that history I nonetheless would fearlessly proclaim myself an authority on God, His word, and His plan for humanity. Why did I have to be this authority? I think I did  because that’s what dogma instills in us the idea we’re meant to assert ourselves as experts and authorities.

 

I'm now not as big anymore on ideas that teach human beings unbending dogma that we only have a very limited chance of finding hope in this life. I don’t necessarily buy into the idea that we’re to blame for all this confusion in life and that we will only live on in a good way by us embracing a narrow doctrine in it’s one and only escape clause.

 

I’ll tell you why I can’t specifically cling to that escape clause. If I prescribed to a salvation “that only saves those who believe in it now” then three of my Grandparents would have absolutely no chance of surviving to live in the presence of a good God outside of this world. Literally they’d all be destined to not only separation from God but have to go to some hideous destination, an invention of terror on a scale unimaginable that was created by writers of an even crueler and more ignorant time, to a place they named Hell.

 

 My own mother is also on that cruel list destined for that mythological realm as are most Chinese and people of allot of eastern countries of the world etc. Also living in “Hell” would be most human beings who have ever lived in the world.

 

I think It's madness for humanity to live amid this chaos in life and to also suspect each and every other person as we think by weighing and judging the destinies of others. Christian universalism is the belief of universal reconciliation, also known as universal salvation, and it is the doctrine that every human soul will ultimately be reconciled to God because of divine love and mercy. That conception of God seems far more just and believable to me.

 

 This journey we’re on instills in us ideas that naturally suspect and distrust others. We form into our clichés, into circles of ideologues at odds with ulterior groups of people, and we do it all as we think and socialize. We conform to our ideas and build these politicalized personal identities. I think mankind needs and deserves to be given ultimate understanding in all this unfairness.

 

If one day it were revealed, for whatever reason, that life’s terms and the acting forces on us were this way unfairly (yes unfairly!) then I wouldn't be surprised to find that out! If through that disclosure life has then afterwards prepared something good for us “instead” of more punishment on human beings, (the victims) I don’t consider that scenario wishful, naïve, evil or a sinful way of thinking or hoping or even trusting. If it’s disobedient, defiant, chaotic, rebellious thinking to think like that then we truly are lost in a world of pure madness.

 

 I don’t doubt the possibility that I’d be meeting the same Jesus as revealed by the Gospels by now pursuing a broader more inclusive love reaching all human beings. We are far more inclusively loved then we now fathom I think. I feel this way because this is where my faith and the example of Jesus Christ points me. I plan to write more  as a heretic in the future about this also. The rack, the torture wheel and the guillotine awaits my rebellion. 

Is fairness in life a possibility? (written while drinking whisky)

If fairness was no more then merely a vague theory, a wishful thought, or a positive claim in our world then what would that mean then for our hope as human beings? If fairness could not be trusted then then what would that mean?

 

 Oh who are we kidding, or who am I kidding, what makes anyone think fairness can be trusted anyway? We must be all doomed then right? whatever that means!

 

Will this magical “fairness,” if it were to exist at all, solve all the unfairness we now currently see in our lives? Will the agony of ghastly wounds, for example, or other multiple horrific life experiences be then be ultimately corrected because of it? Will this mythical fairness then restore the broken person to full health in the end? That seems unlikely though doesn't it given life’s contrasting reality?

 

Fairness seems to be foreign to our world in at least the use of reason wondering about it doesn’t it? True the world is beautiful and interesting but experience itself is tainted by the tragic and ugly.

 

Fairness is then what a giggly and overly positive pipe dream? Isn't that all it is don’t you think? Isn’t that the fairest answer to conclude from a hope in fairness prevailing in the end?

 

Fairness claims exist to us yes. Our moral judgment and it’s measurement evaluates the struggle of our experience and try’s to measure life to work out for the good. We work to make life even handed, just, and to work out beneficially by philosophical explanations so that the course of life gets fairly fulfilled.

 

The problem is the world and it's forces interfere with that optimistic perspective.  As we go about examining life honestly we struggle because of opposite contradictions. Intruding into that vague flimsy constructed hope life’s terms interfere by honestly fact checking our optimism. Fairness thereby gets partially bulldozed over.

 

 Evil then in it's suffocation in it’s resulting suffering and unfairness goes about acting indifferently to all our optimism. Unfairness  confuses that optimism of ours by squashing our hope to make sense of life which is to no end full of far too much chaos and confusion to reconcile easily with hope.

 

 Fairness haunts us then as we hunger after it like a hungry leech aspires to suck unto a bathers ankle. We want justice and fairness to prevail and for good to be the ultimate actor behind our fumbling and bumbling grasp of what really is happening in our struggling reality in this world. The question is then can we have confidence fairness resides over all of us? Well the jury is still out on that. As the philosophers and theologians amass their repetitious arguments and amass volumes of hypothesis their answers themselves prevent a certain conundrum to us.

 

The problem ultimately in life is is that life is littered with the beautiful and the horrific. Nothing in our life experience absolutely decides for us anything. We the vulnerable and impressionable open-mindedness people have no absolute answers. Nothing  absolutely describes or defines truth to us absolutely.

 

 If truth was easy business and available to everyone then more people would rest assured in it's agreed upon writings. They would be thereby confident that life has our destiny fairly secured. We would further conclude that human decision making can see our way clearly through it all. Our path would be universally obvious to us.

All who didn't realize that way as the truth "falsely," we’d say, missed discovering it because of their own failure.

 

 The truth however, in reality, is so mired in distraction and confusion that finding it is like searching through litter on the highway for a treasure that none of us knows anyway to certainly find.

 

Let us not despair though for beyond our hope for an antidotes for fairness the world itself still remains awesome. Beyond that confusion of life’s frightening reality is an awesome landfill of inestimable genius. Love is here too also in this world as historical figures, like Jesus, exemplify insight and inspiration to us. All is not lost then, at least not yet.

The understanding of the ages

In the beginning perhaps there wasn't anything, no space, stars, planets, nothing was there. Assuming these things were invented then the inventor must have had a wildly creative imagination. Why do I think so do you ask? Because the inventor decided to create planetary systems, orbiting projectiles elliptically orbiting a sun in an undisturbed orbit lasting billions of years all while moving uninterrupted.

 

The inventor structured an earth at a life sustaining distance from a sun and then unleashed hundreds of thousands of invented phenomena in the plants, animals, mammals that are all distinct and unique creatively and that function with peculiar habits and life sustaining patterns of existence.

 

The inventive mind created one species where every face differed substantially from every other face and they were the human beings. We human beings became aware of ourselves as we are ambitious to understand our world and organize ourselves. The moral struggle is then on in which the inventor perhaps set before people the many challenges that are in place that interfere with perfect moral harmony.

 

Why would the inventor create the conditions of earth to offer such contrast between beauty, happiness, peace with the haunting intrusions of war, hatred, plague and disease.

 

The consequences of thought left to develop and grow is no doubt going to lead to where the people using the thought wish to organize it and persuade by it’s use. The creator must have predicted this would happen and lead to the ideological contention we now know. Was it intentionally prepared like this then? When power is sought the political philosophies that are developed by us are harnessed and used all as ambitious groups compete for credibility and advantage. Was it meant to be like this? Could it be any other way with free roaming ideas?

 

If the world was created purposefully like this what is the end goal.  The genius behind it’s creation might be a transcending power who simply wills these terms into being and then watches them unfold calmly from afar. He never perhaps intercedes or only occasionally and very quietly as certain situations warrant it.

 

Beyond the created earth what else is possible by this eternal Being? Does creativity have limits, boundaries, ending points. Is this a taste, only a teasing, a sign of approach of something greater and grander and more pleasing and do we ever get to see it?

 

The creation of the Universe as a place pleasing to an Omnipotent transcending Being is perhaps pleasing in the infinitesimal subatomic realm as it also is on the grandest of all scales as well. What we know is that nature in the created order is profoundly interesting and increasingly complex in its variety as it’s discovered.

 

We are the discoverers trying to ascertain what these functions all are. The Omnipotent Being probably hardly rests on some moon in deep space. Maybe He abides everywhere and no where instantaneously. Maybe He exists in places beyond our star lit views on summer nights, out in the haunting reaches of infinite scope, lumbering there amid ancient terrain while satisfied in the deepness of His infinite imagination.

 

The power that we think of we hope has the moral integrity and the character of a great compassionate Being who we hope has an ability that can eventually right every wrong, heal every wound, bring peace out of all the aggression and conflict.

 

The weariness of us mankind is haunted by the cold earth and the top soil of the grave that keeps dwindling ever nearer. Death is approaching all as the world orbits on perhaps watched and observed as we move with it.

In confusion and uncertainty I stand

He sat with his head pulled back. The look he held was a blank looking stare. The look seemed to know something the people around him thought from watching him. The features on his face were interesting to the questioning and curios minds beside him. He seemed in this state to be in bewilderment or subjectively to be at a threshold point or an important juncture in life alive in his dimension of time.

 

The look suggested reassignment the people considered who were talking beside him. Perhaps his current philosophy, or any philosophy he'd perhaps studied for personal development, had now utterly failed to satisfy him to explain the truth of life.

 

The observers spoke quietly among themselves about him. It was like, they reasoned, the man was set adrift because of a great realization and now was like an old unwanted ship unsure where to go left to float far away.

 

The people were right about this. The man who now sat there was no longer able to trust in mans knowledge, he’d come to realize this painfully. The man was soberly aware, because of this new realization, that all such belief, in the truth claims of mortal men on the grandest of scale, were finally now to be seen by him for their many inconsistencies. These thought systems were to him imperfectly designed and were only able to give imperfect or even totally fallible answers.

 

The people watching him now could sense the momentous state he now floundered in.

He decided to open up to the people and then went about in telling them his journey and resulting dilemmas. The people of course, to no surprise of his, dismissed his skepticism easily. Like all people they were used to doing this, dismissing other ideas by nature, when dealing in not held ideology.

 

The people in dismissing him, like dismissing other foreign thought of any kind, were to him just acting in their ignorance. They were incapable of registering the complete thoughts behind another persons system of opinions.

 

If they knew his opinions better, he thought, it would make a difference to these people perhaps.

If their minds were able and willing to concentrate simultaneously across experiences to see his views completely they might better understand. Yet because people are limited in conscious deliberation to momentary evaluations of a certain perspective of a personal priority then because of this the people don’t usually have the ability to look empathetically into other peoples minds and see into their constructed ideological worlds. He knew because of this inability to understand others It was very difficult and uncommon for many people to understand different people of differing ideology.

 

The man felt alone now because of all this. He felt naïve to have been down the road he’d just had to walk down over the past years of his life but he still trusted God. The road got him to where he now was. The insight he had come to was to him commonsensical. He thought his new realization was true  because he knew how the human mind gathered information and made decisions and then adopted beliefs. He knew in this decision making process how flawed that human judgment making was.

 

He believed there was perhaps  out there somewhere, an alternative to the absolute explanations of truth held by thought systems of the world. That truth could then, if it was found, describe his world. Yet for now no such authority currently explained the truth. He held the current truth claims of mortal men in universal suspicion of their accuracy.

 

He didn't know enough of life experience, nor did they know enough he felt, to rest in their desperate assurances. Pursuing truth meant the business of finding yourself caught up in a kind of entanglement. That entanglement involved searching for the truth through ideas. In the deceptive entanglements of differing ideas human beings live in the world by adopting beliefs. The vulnerability of a person commonly finds him or herself falsely in the clutches of those variations of differing ideas. Other human beings then more commonly then not lose sight of that other persons hope as a human person because of their held doctrine in that variation of belief. Does this seem wise or

just?

 

The man had looked at the  faces around him in life. It was at the moment upon seeing their innocent faces when he finally registered humanities vulnerability to differing persuasions. He pitied his own humanity then with a mixture of defiance, that we blindly trust by being so easily persuaded, and empathy, for the dignity of the human person. Hopelessly confused the man finally then lost his mind entirely.

 

He was reduced finally to a state of disorientated and nonsensical rambling. He then went wondering away from the village of the people and upon finding a hill he stood there on its brim urinating. He turned and looked back at the world.  He scoffed at the many overly certain minds in it. He mimicked the minds that were convinced that the utterly infinite and uninvestigated expanses that lay beyond them held definitively no intelligent creative life force. He scoffed at man eating whales, parting red seas, and myth systems full of flaws and irregularities like talking donkeys. 

 

What did they want of him anyway, he now asked, a puppet? Did they want of him a believer in fantastical stories of magical earlier times? Did they want to console him with their crafted reassurances in sermon forms? or to terrorize him with stories of judgment and eternal torment? Or steal away his awe at this life existing as opposed to nihilism and nothingness as the real state of any potential order.

 

Lets be real clear about something people. We weren’t given hospitality in a fantastical land of clearly discoverable answers like colorful cheerful roses waiting in a fancy garden for us. Human beings have been lumbering across time taking on evolving explanations all the way along and we as yet don’t know where we are and the truth in totality isn’t yet discernable to any of us. Yet I still have a friend in God. I trust that friendship with God like nothing else and no one can take it from me whether my doctrine is in compliance of their truth explaining or not.

"The knock"

I was thinking to myself and then there came a knock and I wondered if it was made on a door. I wondered thinking upon the sound that I heard there and picturing a door of substantial importance that was being knocked on. What if a very important door exists I then wondered as the tap sounded again. Doors do not offer just passage into the ordinary places alone though, do they, but perhaps they offer a way to somewhere else I considered now. I wondered If such a way to somewhere other then here could be possible. 

if that door could be opened and I could find safe passage inside was going through it's passage going to reveal more then I thought was really possible. The thought made me pause and think. I then heard the knock again realizing it was someone coming back here into this very old world. I then wondered to myself why on Earth would they come back here. 

There were many things I wondered about on that day, but this, the knocking, the other place where it came from, stood out in my mind. 

Hope, I then thought later on, was akin to trust and a confident expectation. Contrasting to that kind of hope at the entrance to Dante's fictional Hell were his writings where the words read, "Lay down all hope, you that go in by me".

 

I picked up the Bible impulsively next and it said “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”  Elsewhere in this book I read “For in this hope we were saved; but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he can already see?” Again elsewhere“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”

 

Finally I read the following passages and really began to think about them.

 

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

 

One contemporary philosopher I then read next understands hope to be more than goal setting, rather as a metanarrative, a story that serves as a promise or reason for expecting a better future.

 

I then read on that he was a postmodernist and believed past meta–narratives, including the Christian story, utilitarianism, and Marxism have proved false hopes and that theory itself cannot offer social hope. He thought that liberal man must learn to live without a consensual theory of social hope.

 

Turning once again to another philosopher he noted that when hope comes into its own is when crisis looms, opening us up to new creative possibilities. With great need comes an unusually wide range of ideas, as well as such positive emotions as happiness and joy, courage, and empowerment.

 

I then began to wonder if we should let anyone tell us "what the truth is?" Why should we trust in these interpreters interpretive capabilities to know the final truth? Why do we, us vulnerable and impressionable minds, seek out the council of others often more learned? We often, it seems, look to them not just for information to shape are awareness of the world but to set answers of our existence in stone for us. In that extra learning of theirs perhaps there just ends up being another way to be more persuasive in delivering theories of really what is the utterly unknown and perhaps ultimately the unknowable.

 

When we hear their speech do we find rest and reassurance in trusting in their ideas? The answers we seek ,after all, might very well be the kind of answers that generally align to what we already knew and what we previously had supported. They are ideas therefore that were part of what we previously had wanted to be true. We therefore

 wanted to rest in that known interpretation of life’s meaning and to have these familiar ideas then drown out all other objections is it fair to say?

 

Is in the pursuit of the truth what is inspired in us a desire to form a position or belief on the truth? That looking for belief ends up being our theory of life’s meaning. Then we hold to our belief while sorting through the other flocks of human beings in the world by making categorical distinctions?

 

But then we in this self guided way separate those like us from those not like us. When we size up the outsiders, do we judge them, and then perhaps do we have the potential to lose sight of them?

 

If we judge then is it not true then that we cannot , in many of us, see the other people’s hopes, dreams, or individual struggles humanely. We may not be able to even empathize or condone or except their very different understandings of "the truth."

 

But what is truth? The rumor that truth comes honestly and fairly to us with universal equality with all people capable of discovering it is just a gross distorted rumor isn’t it? Is the possibility in discovering the truth merely hear say that is passing amid the vulnerable masses. These desperados, us poor people, are the sad interpreters of life who are almost always ill-equipped to know our surroundings accurately. Are simplistic people prepared to hold a license powerful enough to judge their fellow man and know certainly all of humanities only hope in this world?

 

Isn’t truth as hidden and hard to identify as is meaning and what lies beyond us? Aren’t we left to merely take guesses and often wild guesses they end up often being? The unknown doesn’t it haunt us in this way?

 

If we all conformed to a literalist reading of the Holy Bible and there were no scientists or people asking other questions I’d be worried about our self-awareness. Alternatively if there were no group of people studiously examining Jesus sermons and searching for a transcending reality through them I’d be equally distressed since all of this is life business is up in the air. The unknown hides itself from us.