Jesus

Consider this prospect you might like it. “I'm dead!” Whenever that happens to be that I die I don’t know yet the exact date. Unfortunately for the people who might wish me dead now my death won’t be from a suicide unless it’s a Doctor assisted suicide for a terminal illness which I might develop at some point. I do believe strongly that people have the right to receive help dying with a terminal illness. 

 

From the afterlife where “I’m dead” is a place we will all find ourselves in soon enough whenever that is and whatever that ends up being like. Many of us will be dead in the next forty-five years or in far less time. What beyond the grave will look like is a mystery but what follows in coming paragraphs will assert to know and have insights. 

I believe I will regret something once I’m in Heaven. Eventually when It comes time to be there, after seeing everyone on Earth of our generations move beyond the Earth, I will feel a compassion which will be directed toward everyone upon seeing them anew. I think I know this to be true absolutely, not fictionally, in some intuitive way. Once in Heaven beyond the Earth there will come a loving realization that dawns on me, and that also dawns on everyone else, about true reality. With our nature changed and opened to real compassion other people will matter exceedingly more and our deepest regret will be in not having greater compassion, concern, kindness and love for everyone. 

So If I were standing there now in Heaven I know I would have overwhelming regrets for any missed opportunity to show people love or give people hope. I think hope is something real and not something misguided to believe in. For any way that I failed to show people love, which is really what we’re meant to become and be about as people, I will regret everything that ever hurt another person that I have done in my life. If you think that’s gibberish talk you don’t understand God’s true character because that’s what Jesus was about love. 

Once in Heaven I will carry no more attitudes of stubbornness there. I will entertain no selfish ego, justify no resentment towards others, and have no more thoughts and ideas of hostility or revenge that rise up and trouble my mind and billions of other minds across the planet. I will  be freed from the contaminations of sin and free of any of evils attack on the human condition. I’ll therefore feel and know entirely then the good I should have said and didn’t and feel solemn regret for any form of hatred or indifference I felt for others.

I will escape the cemetery in my local community where my corpse or dust will be put to rest when I die. I will easily survive my bodies destruction and survive the rumors of my annihilation. In passing from a lessor order of things where the lowly, hilly, windswept terrain around me is; by moving beyond life’s oceans, rivers, and valley grasses and past the intermittent patches of civilization I will then and there finally be with God. I will go beyond any state of disbelief anyone has now to a better place where conflicts that people pursue blindly in ignorance are left behind. I will have stepped beyond those many beguiling, misleading, hostility driven thoughts and ideas. Whatever the source of such conflict is those darkening and troubling Satanic ideas that trouble this beautiful but often indifferent place will be behind me.

Now, If I reach that place before you do, I will be somewhere your not. I’ll be moving out of a place of fear in the here and now on to an existence of total fearlessness. There I will move beyond this current state of sin where evil has an influence. Here experiencing beauty was conditional while there I will go to where a fulfillment of beauty extends into ever increasingly more complex places where there will be ever newer and far richer discoveries of thought to experience.

 In the before, which is the now, I understood the beauty around me but I did not understand it adequately. Here on Earth I failed to properly observe natures passing countryside with eyes that were opened wide enough to reverently see the sights I witnessed correctly, Nor did I listen with ears intently enough to hear the improbable and brilliant sounds around me. I couldn’t properly hear the noises sounding from quiet glens in the countryside, the secluded marshes at night, or to hear the mighty passing waters of streams and rivers.

 Now in Heaven I will set my eyes on those infinite and expanding vistas. The former sights that I experienced I will reflect on with a new appreciation of gratitude. My eyes will be newly opened to the unending and to the eternal.  I am assured by this source of good, a Being of love beyond measurement or limitation, that He loves His creation and I am His creation as is everyone else. I look to this God as a Being of sublimity with a power which satisfies all longings of the heart and more. Greater things then this He will do and you will marvel to see them.

Do we know the inner groaning's of our hearts on Earth. Don’t we feel these longings stir in us intently. We know these guttural, heartfelt cravings after our feelings feel impoverished, when our person gets improperly handled, whenever we’re mistreated in the world. Somehow we didn't, or couldn’t, have our deepest needs met like rightfully we would of had in a better place. We have this sense we feel where we believe in fairness and in it being properly fulfilled or satisfied in this life in our journey but it isn’t. If we could have articulated that inner longing we feel we might see that it was looking for love, understanding, forgiveness, fairness, kindness, an interest from everyone in our well being.

 Life is meant to offer us ultimately more then hope and that is no dream or illusion. I recognize the force half veiled who is responsible as the prime mover of our existence. God is this supreme entity who I search for surrounding me and my often misguided nature that offers us all His forgiveness, love and mercy. I will step forward happily, joyfully, freely into His presence some day where I’ll discover His continual and irremovable friendship. In His perfect love He cares not only about me but equally for all of humanity too. 

You might defiantly want to shout with vulgarity at this post If that's how you respond to how you see life’s terms. If you look at life in a way where you think being realistic about things is being skeptical or doubtful about the future. It’s your right to believe what you believe. I will gladly endure and listen to your curses and debate your arguments. I’ll be here a few years maybe, who really knows or can tell. I am however going to be with God after this life is over. I know that perspective to be a real one whether you understand there is a God or you don’t understand.

I wrest in the assurance I’ve experienced that in God is mercy and an unfailing friendship for us all. I trust that Jesus really did appear in history and that He was more then just a man being the Son of God who died for the sins of the world. 

Deep in a region never witnessed is a Being

Deep in a region never witnessed by us, or before dredged up in mankind's imagination, out there in a lonely uninhabited part of interstellar space, sits a Being older then the known Universe. This Being in fact never did not exist. His ways our human minds cannot begin to adequately understand. 

 We are not built in our human body to think and have brains large enough or to think far enough to register the many experiences beyond us. We can only wrestle now to properly understand even pieces of our world and we have nowhere near reached the reverence for it, nature, and it's processes and phenomena which it should rightfully receive from us. 

 This Being I speak of lives out there forever. He knows no enemy because if anything opposed Him that something would not stand a chance of challenging Him. 

We people think we can judge the world and it's possibilities entirely so as to rule out the possibilities beyond us to which we know nothing of. We are amid uncertainty so being here naturally enough different theories will naturally arise in different ideas entertained by us. Most views therefore deserve to not be put to too much shame. Yet who amongst us really knows enough to dismiss divinity and the possibility of a greater power of the infinite, unending and eternal kind. 

This brilliance of this powers reach that I speak of, if closely examined, would be unspeakable. The door to be opened and then stepped through and entered would reveal there other endless unleashed kinds of inventiveness. There unstoppable creativity would unfold with endless varieties of life far superior to this one. Differing natural laws and ideas there would uproot any estimation of what is possible and it would astound us not by a minutes reflection but across time endlessly marveling. 

These unending discoveries of trying to understand this Beings makeup for us now would render us brain-dead to begin to try and understand it’s unfathomability now. So rich it’s ways would be with them being inexhaustible in their beauty, knowledge and possibility.

  We meanwhile gaze up at a moon hostages to the darkness of star dotted galaxies nearby our own in the Milky Way. Yet we can't vantage beyond the unending eternal reaches, the countless eons of century's unfolding across time, the places outside of here too many to fathom. Those unknowns are too numerous and mysterious in truth to estimate or begin to understand what those mysteries hold.

So we do what mankind likes to do when before this open-ended possibility we dull our senses down by providing from our false knowledge false answers. By our false knowing we teach young minds how reality is supposed to work. We answer the mystery which should rightfully begin from a starting point that acknowledges that we offer only weak and fragile guesses about truth. We surround ourselves with false reassurances that we have somewhat of a grasp on this puzzle and the truth is we don’t.

We reproduce skepticism about the possibility of alternative life far beyond what we can grasp by reducing the size of the mystery. We often defiantly eliminate God from the remotest possibility for an answer or explanation for this existence. We often doubt the possibility of extraterrestrial life as well doubting whether conditions for life can exist like they do here elsewhere.

The great minds of man in this way serenade the school children with their antidotes. We are soothsayers, know it all's, standing spellbound before the greatest of all unknown possibilities. The eternal sky and the secrets of it’s abyss in the endlessness of time abide out beyond the places we sit and ask our questions from. Mystery is abounding in our reality now unsolved and entirely open-ended.

A great imagination who is God

If a great imagination exists responsible for all that we know now here, for all of life’s terms, possibilities, and laws. If this form of ultimate imagination is properly named God. If God therefore does exist, which I know He does personally, and He is capable of designing any kind of world within His omnipotent power He wills what does that really mean for us.

 

If God can easily realign the cosmos, by His will, and much more then that if He so chooses. If He can therefore change those limitations that we presently know on earth into something even more far reaching and creative what would that mean. If He could transform  our present human freedom by writing into being and existence new and ever more freeing experiences. God could therefore redesign us, improve His creation, by putting us in unusual places over time or by simply resurrecting us entirely to some new vision that He has for us.

 

That would be within God’s ability and right which is an ability that might seem partially self-evident in our present awareness if we look around us now at the mysterious unknown with the right insight. He has within His master control the knowledge and ability, within and outside of time and space, to do this.

 

For me the God responsible for life as we know it can do all this easily. This world is not His best prototype either as beautiful and awesome as it is. Life’s mysteries, as they can seem to us now, seem fixed and impossible to transcend for us like a better world is wishful thinking. The eternal reaches of a good Deity however can and do expand far past our present appreciations. Worlds, beyond the one we know now, can exceed this one in their reality. Through the many open-ended possibilities of creativity known only by God those possibilities can differ from this imperfect world as we see it now.

 

So too will anger in people recede through this attained wisdom in a plan. Our fears will be diminished and finally be extinguished forever. Hope will go from a dulled holding of it’s future promise, where hope arrived appearing only unpredictably at certain times by glimpses, to finally appearing for us where we are able to see the glory and possibilities of infinity and eternity within creation. We will be able to see that which exceeds beyond our present imaginations grasp.

 

Love will completely envelope us which was seen before only in glimpses.  The ability to know good is now going to be freed to a more total freedom to understand real love as constantly being present with us with no more uncertainties. Where we had been we had reasons to doubt and to be skeptical about hope and faith. We now will finally see truly what we are really a part of in the grand scheme of creation. Our lives, we will soon discover, are in the hands of an eternal Being who’s nature is pure good and if we don’t now desire good one day we will mature to celebrate joyfully what that really means.

The worth of the human person

When we look at the Ideas and accumulated beliefs we face in life we may easily be able to recognize that these beliefs were delivered through various arguments of history. This thought the arguments used produced a system of thought that became accepted and was passed down. It was used by us personally to form our belief story that gives order to our world view whatever our view is and whatever form it’s in.  

This process of belief building across humanity I interpret creates a struggle where ideas and what is accepted as truth and what isn’t is pursued. These ideas are competed over for acceptance. The truth in it’s various and differing claims, in this way, is fought over for what legitimately is the right way of seeing the truth. Everyone in the struggle is asserting what they think and sometimes demand the truth is.  

I wonder about this struggle sometimes from my limited knowledge on the topic. I see this pursuit of truth as mysteriously being part of how the world works. Different ideas are arranged in the effort of pursuing change through that influence. The change comes through speeches delivered in lecture halls, writings written in newspaper story's, teachings argued from the pulpits, etc. with it all effecting Earths cultures and civilizations.

Religion makes claims in this competition for ideas and it uses it’s own ideas to persuade what people’s beliefs are.  We often contemplate how we got here and what the overarching force, power, or influence of this life being here really is.

What ethical influences get pursued or opposed by people is in direct response to what we believe. What people understand to be our eternal fate is all contested by different kinds of beliefs. As we debate about these things a question becomes will people choose to accept the existence of God.

My question then is Is it fair to use religious doctrine to justify blaming the individual for his/her resulting opinions, understanding and perspective while that individual life is effected perhaps innocently or ignorantly by alternative thought.

Humanity at large is divided across the earth with different converts to many of the worlds ideas. These ideas, in whatever form they take, effect all of us everywhere. Isn’t it irrational in the way we think of our neighbor for us to judge each other coldly. We try and decide what judgment God will impose on all human beings. Is our ultimate hope and salvation or abandonment to be determined by every vulnerable persons feeble ability to be able to transcend a specific experience and limitation of judgment. Isn’t it ridiculous to expect everyone to attain and know certain ideas perhaps entirely foreign to that persons culture. Those ideas may not reach his/her ears in attractive form if at all.

The person deciding what the truth is may actually be wrong yes. Truth claims are acquired by believing different things formed into argument. The limitations on peoples opinions means that there is a vulnerability in us to be effected and influenced by persuasion. This must be something clearly understand by an all knowing God. If we study history we see in the dark ages the limitations on knowing the Theology then that is now common to our age. Because of human ignorance people did not know much about Jesus but if Bibles had of been widely printed or read it was  to result in the condemnation of Hell for the unsaved. Error more commonly then uncommonly has been the order of existence and is prevalent across the human condition. We are also all vulnerably influenced by authoritative appeals for our minds loyalty that is competing for our conviction mysteriously in life.

Those appeals will affect what we understand in different regions, cultures, and because of different educational opportunities we face etc.. Why should we put blame on any individual or group among the different communities of people who must live with and face an unavoidable discrepancy of error that is natural and unavoidable to the human condition. That kind of common error forms all our incomplete thoughts wherever we are and is the common process that we all face. It’s more then irrational  to condemn others that face this common error to knowing what the real truth is. We exist in a place of much uncertainty to what the truth is so this is most unwise. All people are incapable of thinking and agreeing with you or me in so many ways because our imperfect minds are all effected by various perspectives some healthier then others but all being ideologically compromised somehow.

None of us, I suggest, is so wise to be guaranteed the wisdom to choose right between all the ideas of uncertainty overarching our life. Where one happens to reside living there obviously obstructs ones ability to see truth absolutely. Living there it necessarily effects ones ability to see the truth claim of someone else's. Wherever the individual is to hold him/her to an account of condemnation for the resulting seeds of thought they have arrived at there is bazar and unfair. The fact that misunderstandings, errors, and misbeliefs, will occur to us all in all of our experiences is so common that it is more then strange to condemn people for it. It is especially strange when we suggest that God will judge the world in this way.

Fairly speaking we should be able to see where ideas can commonly go wrong. We should not assume that personally we’re not susceptible to the error of judgment common to all human beings. We shouldn’t worry about our own skin being self-satisfied we have it all right while being suspicious and condemning of others. Ideas have always lead opinionated people by leading them with great conviction down the many ideological roads that compete for the truth of what’s legitimate in life. This happens in different thought form across the planet regardless how insightful the person deciding within these ideas is. Our environment produces these many different believers of all differing ideas.

To give up on anyone who is a part of this existence in life is mistaken. Here in this existence ignorance of what the truth is is the general rule of how things really work in life and not the exception of things. It is odd to be a human on planet Earth and think one knows everything when life has never come with any total guarantees of clarity as to what truth is in completeness.

Why do we equate from this confusion of life that man should be judged severely by God for error. The ideas we acknowledge in error are often born naively into our thoughts from ideological persuasions that win our trust.  We are in a world where propaganda and persuasions of all sorts make for what is the most unfair kind of burden to be put on us. The worth of the human person must be preserved and always defended when we think of what our fate will be gauging our destiny on the guidance of archaic writing.

Will God cast away into Hell the conformists to alternative ideas that seem attractive but are wrong. if the ideas are wrong does that person have any universal commonly held opportunity to recognize it so. When we look at other people of other cultures and beliefs why can’t we see ourselves in them. Why don’t we look at them and see them exactly as we all are which is entirely alike, worth the same amount as we are, and loved the same as us. Existence should be a place where not one of us is any better then any other in the eyes of a Holy God.

Where does evil come from?

We all may know and feel that cruelty is a part of the dynamics of life. We probably know that cruelty is a part of our human history and evidentially that it’s a part of life’s conditions presently throughout the world. One aspect of this cruelty, unfortunately for us of course, is the act of war. This cruelty unfortunately seems unavoidable as a necessity with all of it’s ugly consequences.  

 Human Beings could go further then this view about the necessity of cruelty just in war. Next they can go beyond justifying the necessity of just wars to saying that there must be an unavoidable justification for having other positions of cruelty in life. Like the cruelty in war then other violence, or other kinds of retribution, is not only unavoidable but it’s revengeful thinking too then can be excusable and rightly argued to be justifiable. 

 If we look at this in this light and justify cruelty too easily we then can justify our desire for cruel things to happen to the people we know or have opinions of. This desire we can have arises through our pain but yet is inspired mysteriously from somewhere other then ourselves meeting our mind. We reason the positions we have through our pain with our criticism falling on certain others, it happens to us all, as we go about aiming our anger and resentments at others we know or begin to dislike. We target those other people, often enough, who scheme about us, insult us, betray us, or hurt our honor. We then form the desire to even be cruel that is usually directed at those who threaten our wellbeing in some deeply personal way.

Cruelty seems to be an impulse and resulting calculation that rises up in our imaginations while seeming to happen as it does like it came to us from somewhere else other then here.  It’s calculations inspire the worst in us and can come upon us suddenly in anger. The desire for vengeance fills our thoughts while fueling our minds with the conviction that the anger we feel, by our reasoned response to an insult, is entirely justified.

Why do these ugly thoughts, that are aimed at others, materialize and challenge us in this way I often wonder. Where does all this overwhelming and negative persuasion even come from. We all might wonder, how can an often ill-equipped, naive, and vulnerable mind survive there influences and go unscathed through this life. That susceptible person, after all, is often living in a place in the world somewhere where  the arguments and influences on him or her may there lack having a desired alternative influence of good on that life. That person there simply then exists where the dynamics of certain bad ideas are unavoidable and therefore by being there those ideas go about effecting their judgment and perhaps their behavior with unfortunate consequences. 

There are certain people in the world, the right kind of councilors and teachers, that can influence a person away from acting destructively but many don’t hear them. Guiding our thoughts for instance can be Jesus teachings or those people who teach Him and His ways to others.  

And yet hatred, arising up in our thoughts from somewhere, has somewhat mysterious and unknown origins. This hateful desire springs up in us all and is like a destructive fuel that continually gets ignited by human judgment across the human experience. We are challenged by it for peace and love and tolerance for others while this force is continuously inspiring and creating conflict by making enemies between human beings. 

Often a good form council on us and our lives, throughout the history of the world, seems plainly to be simply absent through many personal experiences. Because of historical, geographical, cultural, ideological, political and different forms of religious influences on a person, we all face various degrees of insight, and lacking there of, into these challenges that are all dependent on what we know and witness. Often there is absent in our life a way to avoid hatred and therefore it wins battles on us across the earth.

There is too, in the quiet of our minds, alternatively the best kind of ideas to be recognized too. Hopefully we can find this kind of thinking, this kind of good, and see that there is dignity and worth in all human life in the grand picture of our existence.

In our culture certain forms of entertainment, some I see as good, some not, come flooding into our minds. One persuasion in a way that’s acted out for us is the example of revenge taking on the screen. We witness it daily through acts of sensationalist violence in the portrayal of retribution for entertainment. We witness violence again and again in this way. Vengefully we feel it as subconsciously it directs our imaginations. Naively as children we watch T.V adopting it’s norms as the treating of various enemies on the screen, that’s played out for us repeatedly, determines what we will fantasize about doing to other people we don’t like throughout important moments of our lives. This kind of example is too common and far too embedded in our civilization. Because of these effects it now seems too normal and justifiable for people to relive daily these kind of thoughts. I feel It is an ugly pollution on our minds that’s always negatively shaping us.

  Where do the destructive and punishment desiring thoughts directed negatively toward other people really come from though. I don’t think violent thoughts wishing harm on others come from God. The source of such hatred instead is an enemy of God. We must be confronted by an evil force in this way. The various results of this influence and the impact on our lives is tragic, sad and unfortunate. Everywhere in The New Testament of the Holy Scriptures suggests alternatively the supporting of thought and behavior that loves God and loves one another.  I feel that God has no hatred for anyone regardless of the persons moral or ideological state. 

Just as often we may have a way to defeat evil in our lives. Evil does not win all the battles nor is the world destined to always tolerate it’s ways. Through the use of our will,  if first we can be assisted in our life's thinking, and we can get to the place where we have a chance to have the insight to recognize good and it’s example we can then use our will to pursue good. When we hear Jesus teach as an example to us “Love your enemy and do good to those who hate you and despitefully use you” and we listen to Him or when He says to“Forgive and you will be forgiven” and we recognize something beyond us through His words then we grow spiritually. As we respond to such insights by resisting anger and hatred we grow in this insight.  As we sit quietly in our thoughts and struggle in our mind we all seem to battle this unrelenting challenge for forgiving and letting go of our anger against one another. Can we grow in our ability to do it and grow to understand God’s ways.

There is this struggle is our interaction with other minds who inform and shape us with their persuasion on us that is always effecting us. Through these other people’s own successes or failures at this struggle they too are in the same battle as we are as we both effect each other. By their thoughts and communication they share their influences on us. As we interrelate with them it impacts them in their thoughts in return.

I ask finally then what truly is fair and how should we really see one another in this life. Can we fairly try to love everyone everywhere despite the shape of other people’s minds in the world.  I believe personally that love is the true nature of God. Everyone deserves to be loved. The nature of God does not desire cruelty, hatred, or violence and Jesus teachings support a God who loves everyone across the earth.  God is the one who is merciful and compassionate above all. We all struggle through our thoughts to be peaceful and kind toward one another. I’m not ashamed of sharing this view at all.

Trandscending self the journey

What if I was able to transcend myself and my own life experience. By doing this, by transcending my own experiences, I am supernaturally then able to live in another's shoes and to reorient myself with that other human life elsewhere in the world. There in their shoes I’m able to not merely eat with that other person, or commune in the same village with them, but to more completely really and fully get to know what it is like to be them.  

If I’m able to really have that persons parents, to be of the same race, nationality, and to have the same friendships and same cultural persuasions. If I’m able to come to know what that person is naturally drawn to in the world.  

An evangelist from abroad might ask or demand that person to step out of their own native experiences to receive something alien to them but I’d be refraining from any demands like this to accept ideological correctness. 

I’d instead now have a full awareness of the native persuasions shaping other people. My awareness of those persuasions now are as near to me as the persuasions I’ve experienced here in my country that have shaped me until now. I wonder if that awareness would then allow me to truly empathize with that other person elsewhere. I predict I would then see the fog lift and see another simple mind possessing dignity and vulnerability and confused by the world. Possibly I’d see them in a fairer way with far greater understanding now with empathy. I might abandon any form of judgmental condemnation or religious, racial, ideological, or national suspicion. 

I’ve come to see with schizophrenia that not only am I confused about things but we are all confused in life, all of us, wherever we are. By making this kind of journey I’d desire to shed my selfishness that’s worried me about my future security. I’d temporarily shelf my own “get out of jail” free card or “go to Heaven with God” free card in order to get to better know another human being in our shared human experience. It might take considerable courage to do this of course. I’d not seek to merely find the comfort and reassurances in like thinking circles. I’d not go to that familiar place where I’d be repetitively reminded of being right about the world. Instead I’d willfully venture into a larger earthly struggle facing everyone who lives with an open heart and with an open-mindedness. 

The journey of being uprooted from self and from that interest to truly see another person might mean leaving behind ideological security. It's implications might demand I truly see other people more fairly. The ideology I had held unto had sized up the human drama and secured my place in the minority of all human beings in the order of existence across time sparing only a few from damnation. I had found familiarity through this belief with a community believing in a narrow road to life. By a preachers words I had been taught that I was given survival through eternal life from anything that could befall on me forever.  

Now I might be testing the possibility that I really need for God’s love and mercy to extend far past those boundaries I and people like me have felt reasonable with. I however still trust in the same crucified Jesus dying for the sin of the world. 

So temporarily now I leave my own beliefs for a time behind transplanted thousands of miles away into the midst of another culture. Here I meet that other person and here I become like them in every way. I end up feeling their struggle, knowing their reasoning, dealing with the very same uncertainty that’s universal in all of us.

 

Here too I find are the same teachers and shapers of minds. Here, like everywhere, this other logic is entrenched in understandings following lineages of traditions. These ideas are shared through inherited family beliefs and through that culture. The religions differ here but yet nonetheless I get to know the aspirations of the person in my new familiar home. I find here among other people that they are not only worth finding compassion for but are worthy of an equally shared humanity as well. They are worthy of God’s love as everyone is.   

Love as a force had lead me here I realize. I fought by coming here for the trust that there believably could be hope in this life across the planet for everyone. I desirably asked what if there is a fairer ordering of earth then the different traditions of belief have been able to organize life fully into so far. Can there be a wiser knowledge that transcends even all the good things exceeding them and what we currently now know. Surely God is greater then everything we human beings know. Of course He is greater then how we think about Him.  

Compassion came over me in thought as I listened to the sound of waters. These mighty rivers that make glad the city of God. Here was the Holy place where the most high dwells.

The possibilities of the unknown

In the deep, amid the unknown, in the depth of space, is where we mysteriously are sitting now on this lonely planet. We are amid this vast expanse of mysterious terrain around us here somewhere that we don’t now know or fathom the possibilities for with any adequacy.  

We do not begin to understand exactly the terms of this arrangement we’re eerily a part of. We wonder about it often though. I did, I just wondered about it just now listening to the eerie sound of a train whistle that went passing through my small village in the middle of the night here. I stood in the dark out back looking up into the far reaches of stars and space. Here amid these lonely coordinates, here part of earth, I wondered about it while not understanding how it all came to be as it is. I was confounded by this great unknown.  

We may be far, where we now are, from what are the truly more fantastical cities out there. We may be far from real civilization, places much more impressive then the limitations of what a mortal imaginations can predict about other places. Our predictions then therefore are limited to a natural wonderment because we exist on Earth. Others out there however may know a greater, larger inventiveness one that salvages natures beauty for meditation in a far superior way to what we can now fathom. We may not be mature enough really to know such things or to predict or understand nature or God’s endless possibilities. 

It may be real that there is much to be encountered far out in the cosmos past the quiet interstellar limits with it’s icy commits and métiers. Out there amid dark matter maybe there are worlds and realities transcending earthly imaginations offering many possibilities. The sky out there is not just a dark dry empty canvass of deep empty space but the home of actual truth, of real phenomena, of real experience. We now presently exist in a place of real possibility.

Meanwhile as we live life here on earth life has great uncertainty as to our futures. Everyone alive knows this as we all are confounded and perplexed by a chaos we presently experience here. We have the uncertainty of death and what becomes of us after that to ponder. This chaos involves growing minds interrelating with people using information and ideas to personally predict its outcome. Billions of us in this way claim to have the chaos of ideas all sorted out adequately enough in the numerous belief convictions we all have. We have beliefs too many to count, beliefs with too many variations, often enough, to find close similarity between them.

The world never does solve this chaos problem for us in this way. People say some people have it right and then say to those people who do not have it right, they suppose, they have perhaps lost at this eternal game by its heavy-handed rules. These people then who think these rules divide up the hope humanity has or doesn’t have in this severe way openly admit that the rules they follow instruct them that the majority of humanity are doomed.

The escape clause for finding eternity happily is an old formula. Attached to these written arguments are some alarming words about human fate and the hope of all human kind. According to this form of teaching you best get your minds ideas right amid this fearful thought struggle.

Even though we should all be able to see that the mind, across time, from place to place, and experience to experience, gets easily contaminated by different reasoned arguments. Nonetheless you best not allow your judgment to get stunted by error in this way in your course of thought people tell you. Life and its pains and therefore it’s ideological confusion must not rob you of your only hope. Some people would suggest to you that this is God’s plan in very strong and compelling language. There is nothing fair about this if it’s true.

Isn’t error and confusion in life, though, normal as a thinking person exists in community, whatever community, as this confusing process plays out across humanity. Does God love those people who merely by human, environmental, and cultural weaknesses come to see the truth or its relevancy differently as a belief.

 The journey to finding the supposed absolute of how things really work, in the grand scheme of things, after all, has many teachers of many beliefs. Many of the different teachers probably aren’t as wise as many of the other such teachers. Nonetheless, inevitably millions of teachers have a different account of truth then and they are persuading billions of listeners who are just people looking for “the truth.” Is it right that we hold those audiences of those teachers, and all mankind in general as well who struggle in exactly the same way, accountable to this ideological correctness demand some of us think is correct. So they must get the truth right no matter how impossible and improbable that is in life or else they are determined to be doomed.

We are saying to the world at large to know this particular truth that we confess to know or else find yourself not only denied hope but now forever in pain, forever amid fear, evil, and eternal torture and torment itself.

This antiquated old overly certain and narrow road to hope then seems to spit out Gods children on many shores of the world. This view that goes about spitting humanity into a fiery satanic pit to suffocate among sulfur and ash. This is a kind of belief as opposed to a belief, hope and faith in a God which I think is more real. A fair God, a merciful Jesus, finding us wherever on earth we are, whatever shape we’re in now, or after our life is over, and loving and forgiving us all by His death on the cross. Blessed are the merciful.

How does God feel about other countries, other religions, and the dignity of people of other cultures?

On this planet earth that we inhabit there are numerous outlooks, attitudes, values, morals, goals, and customs that are a part of all that we know and experience here. Whatever form of persuasiveness these persuasions have on us they will undoubtedly lead, inspire, and unfailingly win the loyalty of each single mind to some perspective. We are individually standing alone in the world and standing here now we will unavoidably adapt to these influences knowingly or not. As a lone person we now stand mysteriously before uncertainty standing here before the utter unknown.

 

For anyone hungry for truth, or at least relevancy in how one chooses to live or care about what matters, that persons journey then, as a mind being fed perspective, is a journey busy acquiring some form of knowledge and truth perspective. What that person will be confronted by in life is different for each person everywhere too.

 

Despite any hesitation that person has, or resistance in allowing change, inevitably and unavoidable that person will be persuaded and changed in the world somehow by the worlds ideas. Whatever continent or culture one is from  ideas are being experienced there. The person will encounter human arguments by preachers, teachers, advisers, friends, political leaders, media etc. These persuasions will then form what that person normalizes and sees as their truth. It can be observed naturally enough by reason that ideas then shape human beings everywhere right?

 

If our imperfect minds are being adapted imperfectly to different influences, and I’m being shaped in this way, as is everyone else, then our experiences cannot be anything other then unique and different then. The persuasion these ideas have on people must be better for some, worst for others, from Iran to Moscow to Bangkok to Brazil and to the entire world beyond. The effects that different influences of thought has on people are these not influences falling on the perceptions then of innocent people.

 

 I believe we can suspect and look at people when they have different political objectives in a way where they aren’t like us exactly. How do we view people when they are militant or their nationalism and position in the world isn’t in harmony with ours. How do we view foreigners when their religion is foreign to us. With Christians when other people far away from us deny our claim of salvation and deny who God is supposed to be how do we see them really. Can these other people, after their different ideology is accounted for in their different thinking,  be seen as the same blank slate, as innocent, vulnerable, susceptible people. Isn’t that what we all really are in this world as we struggle to understand. 

 

Do some of us approach the people of other nations like they were predestined by God to be inherently evil people.

 

From birth we see no child anywhere in the world as inherently evil.  Why then does it seem in the same breath as we say that no child in the world is evil do so many of us, of course not all of us, then lose sight of the intrinsic value of entire populations of the men and women there. Just twenty years later now the once children, now young men and women, have become so different. They have supposedly in our eyes perhaps reached the age of accountability. It is like they were faced with such a fair chance to think like we think. Now it is like for many of us like they exist somewhere God is not.

 

As adults how did these people stop sharing our humanity. True many informed people love their enemy and wish well on everyone but many don’t. True these others might hate us and have an agenda that rivals us. They may even want to hurt us. Yet why do they not appear to us as innocent victims of doctrine that has shaped their minds. These people were after all won over by a dictator or preached to by a different religious influence in that state. These people were shaped by breezes of ideas often naively and innocently enough. They were persuaded by persuasions that we all adapt to, if confronted by the same kind in the same way. It is true that these ideologies can come in a truly ugly form but the human person is vulnerable to indoctrination, is drawn to group dynamics and to causes to live and die for like every human being.

 

In our defensiveness of the threat posed by other people lost to evil influences out of self preservation and our defense of our values we will of course be guarded and prepared to fight for those values. Yet should other people ever lose their human dignity. Do they ever lose their value as children of God. Why must we hold so many human beings with such suspect in our eyes for what is unavoidable. What is unavoidable is that ideas are harnessed and spread and effect masses of humanity through indoctrinations that they can’t foresee. Shouldn't we therefore have compassion on our fellow human beings like us everywhere. What we instinctively seem to do is judge others and categorize them according to ideological correctness but is this really fair.

 

As a human person we have dignity and a great potential for good. The evil in the world doesn’t have to come with clarity for us and probably never has when it affected us across history. Evil just effects minds everywhere who don’t understand a better way confusing a person and harming them and others.

 

There is no guaranteed way to avoid evils persuasion on the innocent person. Evil effects a persons reasoning, judgment and behavior. Evil inspires deviousness, hatred, it justifies war and does indignities to human life while robbing peace.  Evil steals family members to death, leaves people alone, and forsakes the poor and needy.

Evil wishes to humiliate people. There is no guarantee that others effected by evil won’t intrude into your life or mine. Its effect on us is very possible as we try and live a good life.

 

We all have minds that are struggling for peace. We want to be loved and naturally enough to be treated well.  The human person, wherever that person is in this world, is fallible, and being fallible a person is universally  ill-equipped and ill-suited to be ideologically lead in one “specific” direction. We are not able, all of us at once,  everywhere we are, to be able to hold one specific belief of what is supposed to be the “truth.” We cannot know that specific belief all of the time and in all of the places. Everyone cannot know the truth now even if part of the truth is really attainable in this world. People by nature, simply by the the laws of opportunity and chance, will choose differently when faced with ideas. Naturally people see the world differently. The arguments around those people will be different which means a belief for them on their individual journey through the world is different.

 

Do we choose to love people everywhere and  spare them our ideological condemnations. Is it right instead to hold the position that if people don’t think like me, and those I’m familiar with, they are not on the right side of God and His mercy and His hope. Do we determine therefore, “That those other people over in another part of the world do not see the truth as I see the truth.” Do we reason then that, “They have not accepted the truth and therefore those other people have no future with God.”

 

Is there any compassion or fairness in this view as we consider it at this time in history. In modern times now, in the way we now presently know the world to work, does this even make sense. Is this the position that God would take on this.

 

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father's care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

Karma

In a discussion with a friend on Facebook, who’s name I won’t say here, I was just recently asked the following question. 

“I wanted to pick your brain too. I've been having this conversation online with Christians. They use the bible to explain everything. I'm not a bible person, so I see things a little differently. I know you are well versed on the bible, but you are open minded and also able to see things rationally. So, here is my question. Do you believe in "Karma"?”

After writing my friend a personal note I replied to her question here, for her to read this way, because I like to post things in my blog.

The question Do I believe in karma and your observation that I am well versed in the Bible and also an open minded person I thank you for suggesting. I find your question very interesting material for thought. I don’t think I have a great amount of knowledge to share so whatever I say of course I don’t believe is law. I simply like to weigh in on these subjects and try and understand these subjective questions. I know I answer like an authority, which I’m not, it’s how I approach philosophical questions.

The way I understand karma is that if you do something wrong, if you hurt someone, cause someone pain, the pain you cause to someone else will come back to you again. Maybe this is true somehow, maybe it isn’t.

I think everyone is prone to experience error in their judgment and behavior. A judgment that is made however I don’t think is always made thinking with total clarity. Even most of the time the thoughts involved in people making a decision are thoughts they don’t see the complete facts entirely or accurately for or the full implications of what acting on them will do with total insight. People don’t always see their thoughts or actions accurately. That resulting judgment and course of action is rarely made with 100% clarity. The way the human mind seems to work is ones clarity of mind and moral responsibility can be as low as 33% or even less where some minds live obliviously in a total fog. 

When we get angry we expect and demand that those who do the wrong we now judge should have seen right and wrong in their minds. Through our anger at them we think they should have known at that particular deciding moment in life, however much they were surrounded by negative influences, that they should have known how to make the right moral judgment in that situation.

Our anger in judging human error is often high-minded and unfair however. We delight through that judgment in our exceptional status. There on our moral high ground we rage with self-righteousness judging what we see elsewhere in the human condition. Our judgment adds fuels to our feel good about ourselves gossip circle. There in our contagious gossip networks we feel good about ourselves while resenting others outside of the pack. For the person that’s being judged, I think, often enough for them, that that particular experience at that particular time was a choice for that person that seemed logical enough given their percentage of moral insight that they had at the time.

In that course of wrong action, through the fog of immorality, probably because of subcultural role models shaping their norm, there they act. Likely they have no ethical direction, no conditioning of their thoughts in a healthy way. They simply have thoughts that are left to wonder off course while having no way to counter evil itself. They have no direction where right is even to be found. They are in a dark place where they don’t believe right is even relevant. The right path forward Is totally unrecognizable for them where they are.

I think there are literally billions of people on earth who are victims of evil. It’s human nature to despise other groups of human beings who really have no clear way to reason or understand how to reach thinking that is fairer and more inclusive. They have no perspective that loves all of the human condition. There is not a councilor nearby them to hear or to help them through their struggles.

Jesus speaks in the New Testament through several parables about forgiveness. I don’t read the Bible much anymore but one parable from vague memory that Jesus taught I think was basically about a judge. I think the judge is meant to be God. The judge forgives a man with an enormous debt everything he owes. The man in return was asked to forgive other people the little debt they owed him. Owed then a small debt by someone else the man who was forgiven by the judge then refused to forgive that debt even after God forgave him so much more. So the man was sentenced to prison by the judge.

I should read the story again to know if I have it right. It makes sense to me that God forgives like this however. Some of us have bigger debts then others but God says that He is the one who really substantially forgives everything. He is really forgiving so much more then what we are. Through our anger and resentments we are not willing to do for others the things God does for us even when it’s very important to God that we learn to do this. I think that we are asked to forgive because forgiveness is real with God.

What I know of Karma is it is about doing something wrong and then being repaid the unkindness down the road. I think it’s also how people wish the injustice they feel and direct their anger toward should to be handled. Its that we wish the wrong doer to suffer for those wrongs.

I think that there is a God however and that He is forgiving. I think if we do something wrong, and know God, that the more we know Him better the more He will have us revisit those errors from our past in our minds. We will revisit those wrongs many times as we grow in compassion and in love. Going over those pains we have caused I think gradually will lead us to greater spiritual maturity. Injustice, cruelty, hurtfulness, violence, and all wrongs like these will be things we oppose happening to anyone. So we will be deeply sorry for those wrongs thinking much about them a thousand times in a year. I think eventually that our minds will grow clearer, our moral judgment will become sharper, while we come out of the fog the closer to God we get.

I think what I believe is that I don’t think we will be punished forever but that Gods nature is ultimately one of forgiveness. However Karma I think may happen in our journey with God. You can’t draw near to love without evaluating yourself. As you grow yourself you reflect on your past and the person you are. You draw nearer to love and you can’t help have deep regrets about who you’ve hurt. Drawing near to God then I think is like experiencing karma because you do have to come to terms with your wrongs and you do experience things in your growing conscience which is a kind of pay back.

The struggle of how to look at the world

In a chat room I was in recently I was listening to a debate between an Islamic Sunni and Shia defender. I was not of a critical mindset listening to their discussion or in the reaction I gave toward either chatter. There is a reason I wasn’t critical or hostile toward them. I have an evolving perspective of life, the world, and the human condition that has lead me to where I am.

 

My perspective has been growing and changing a lot lately. There is a reason I find no justification for the condemnation of either person in this chat room and a reason that I refuse to condemn anyone anywhere of whatever religion, nation, or culture. There is a reason I won’t condemn and a reason why I now have universal compassion.

 

I’ve been increasingly made more aware and empathetic to what we’re all up against in thought. Clearly there is a great vulnerability experienced by the human person in the world up against the existence and persuasion of thought and it’s systems of all kinds.

 

Anyone who study’s history and uses philosophical inquiry to try and appreciate life the more they must see the human person is an impressionable, vulnerable, susceptible, easily persuaded, often naively manipulated, very gullible victim in a planet of ideas, ideology, religion and tribalism.

 

Consider the person as a blank piece of paper. As the person goes through life all arguments effect the person on the page of the paper. The person isn’t capable of a great discernment merely by existing in nature because whatever culture, whatever personal experience the person has, it can and does effect any person anywhere they happen to be in the world. A person is susceptible to any kind of system or persuasion of thought. No one is truly immune to catching the bug of whatever ideas overwhelm their experience, location, nation, or because of whatever religion happens to dominate their environment there etc..

 

A person may think they have this great will that they can use anywhere to sift through all human experiences.They may naively think that they could have lived in any other persons shoes everywhere at all and still arrived at the same version of the truth as they presently profess to know but they are greatly mistaken.

 

Thinking oneself able to guarantee to personally know all worthwhile thought is a conviction you may hold but it is like a delusion or a kind of very grandiose false belief. I routinely experience such false beliefs with schizophrenia only these false beliefs are held by you and by most of humanity in some form.

 

Maybe your solidarity and who you accept and who you don’t accept is nationalistic or religious or racial. Maybe you lose favor for non Canadians, non Americans, other races, other cultures, other religions which teach people a tradition you find morally corrupt, ideologically flawed. Maybe you think God is on your side and has decided to favor you over billions of other people.

 

I wanted to say to the Sunni that despised the Shia, and vice versa, why can't you have an understanding for the human condition. I wanted to say to them in a clear way why do you think God favors you and hates the other group. Isn't such thinking confused, angry, a kind of trap that our vague, foggy, unclear minds fall into. Isn’t it a perspective that people constantly arrive at while agitated by what we clearly don’t fully perceive and because of what we misinterpret. These judgments are ones we make far to easily of one another, where often there is no forgiveness, no understanding, just a rivalry and a form of dislike that is often venomous.

 

Aren't the Muslims themselves, with their great philosophers, insightful enough to know that Sunni and Shia converts are simply innocent human minds who have become persuaded by different teachers. Shouldn’t they find understanding then by realizing that vulnerable listeners should retain their same humanity despite the version of Islam they adopt, despite it’s “authenticity,” despite what they hear and get drawn into and follow. Isn’t it really true that people do more commonly then uncommonly get blindly persuaded by teachers of different kinds. These articulate and persuasive teachers have different ways of looking at the world and their sermons and lectures are very compelling to minds looking for guidance. These different ideas suggest what, God, or Allah, as Muslims call God, desires.

 

Then there is Christianity to consider as well. There was the Thirty Year War fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618-1648. Initially it was a war between Catholic and Protestant states. Christians for a long time have fought each other over doctrine and those arguments over theology continue today. There were the religious wars the crusades. There was the Inquisition a Christian version of the same kind of struggles Muslims have faced with Christians killing Christians.

 

I started off by saying I find no reason to condemn anyone anywhere. I love Canada, it’s a great country, and persuasively it can be argued to be the greatest country anywhere on Earth. There is a freedom to love all of humanity from these shores. There is a freedom from here to love and to be compassionate and to hope for all men and women and children everywhere. It is my right to believe in something fairer then what I often hear. That fairness is reachable only by transcending the voices of the supposed knowledge and wisdom around me. It is a freedom to hope in a purpose that doesn’t exclude 3.4th of the world to eternal damnation. It is belief in clearer thought that is reasonable and really understands the ideological struggles humanity faces with different ideas. This outlook sincerely empathizes with the people in all the billions of personal experiences lived in life. It is a search for compassion that empathizes even with those minds trapped under the sway of the rottenness forms of thought who live under the most unfortunate of circumstances.

 

I have my answer how to live with God. I will try to love fearlessly in the face of all evil. I will love beyond the confusion ideas can mobilize themselves in.